In general, conservatives are the contented people. Leftists are the angry people. That psychological difference explains most of what they advocate

Friday, September 16, 2016

The relationship between conservatism and racism

The nature and extent of the relationship is contested but the Left are quite convinced that it is conservatives who are racist. That conservatives are generally OPPOSED to the blatant racism that is affirmative action never quite gets into their heads. Leftists are OBSESSED with race. They look for racial implications in everything. "Racist" is their big swear sword. Conservatives just wish they would stop.

What Leftists do to support their suspicion of conservatives is to do survey research in which they ask one series of questions that identifies conservatism and then another that identifies racism. That such opinion surveys don't predict racial behaviour has been known since the 1930s but let that pass.

They then ask who agrees most with the statements that express conservastism and then ask are they the same people who agree most with statements expressing racism. And they do generally find some overlap.

An unusually sophisticated study in that mould has just come out that has some interesting results, however. The new study looked at the social context in which the statements were made. What do people say when most people around them are conservative and does that differ from when most people around them are Leftish? And they found that context made a big difference.

What they found was that in a generally conservative society, conservatives were NOT racist. It was only among Leftists that conservatives agreed with some racist statements. So Leftism provokes racism. Who'd a thunk it? The Leftist obsession with race makes conservatives a bit racist too. I find that a big laugh. It certainly torpedoes the conventional Leftist view of conservatives.

In summary: In a conservative environment, where little is heard of the constant Leftist yammering about race, "negative outgroup attitudes" are rare and likely to come from both Right and Left. But a Leftist environment is polarizing. The constant Leftist yammering about the evils of whites and the innocence of minorities causes conservatives to react against that and make them more likely to express attitudes that are critical of "outgroups". So it is actually Leftism that causes "negative outgroup attitudes" to be expressed by conservatives.

The journal abstract is below. For the statistically-minded, note that restriction of range effects were allowed for:

The Mobilizing Effect of Right-Wing Ideological Climates: Cross-Level Interaction Effects on Different Types of Outgroup Attitudes

Jasper Van Assche et al.

The present research investigated a multilevel person-context interactionist framework for the relationship between right-wing ideologies and prejudice across two large, representative samples (Study 1: European Social Survey: N 5 56,752; Study 2: World Values Survey: N 5 74,042). Across three different operationalizations of right-wing ideology, two contextual levels (regional and national) of right-wing climate, and three types of outgroup attitudes (i.e., age-, ethnicity-, and gender-based), the analyses consistently revealed cross-level interactions, showing a strong association between right-wing attitudes and negative outgroup attitudes at the individual level in contexts with a low right-wing climate, whereas this relationship is weaker and often even absent in contexts with a high right-wing climate. These cross-level interactions remained significant after controlling for statistical artefacts (i.e., restriction of range and outliers). The authors propose norm setting as the mobilizing mechanism through which a right-wing climate develops and curbs the influence of individual right-wing social-ideological attitudes on outgroup attitudes.

Hillary’s health is a problem, but her lack of honesty could be deadly

“Antibiotics can take care of pneumonia. What’s the cure for an unhealthy penchant for privacy that repeatedly creates unnecessary problems?”

That was former Barack Obama chief campaign strategist David Axelrod’s Twitter reaction to Hillary Clinton’s near-collapse as she was entering a van after a September 11 memorial in New York.

Coming from Axelrod, it is a clear shot across Clinton’s bow coming directly from the Democrat Party establishment as rumors begin to swirl about replacing her atop the party’s ticket in November.

The Clinton campaign’s explanation is that she had seasonal allergies leading to a cough, and then pneumonia which led to heat exhaustion at the ceremony on Sunday. But, based on her actions, it is clear that but for the Twitter video showing her wobbling and falling forward into her van amid Secret Service and personal handlers attempting prevent her from hitting the pavement, the American people would almost certainly never have heard about this episode.

How do we know that? Clinton’s destination after her fall was to her daughter Chelsea’s residence, not to a hospital to treat heat exhaustion, which the New York Post reports was to avoid media exposure. The heat exhaustion explanation was only in response to disclosure of the video, and the bout of pneumonia was not included in the official explanation until hours after that. They were going to cover it up. What if it had been a much more serious condition?

That is not a conspiracy theory. That’s what happened. Clinton was comfortable with failing to disclose a major medical episode even as questions on her health and fitness to serve as commander-in-chief were dogging the campaign. And her campaign only came forward when the truth could not be denied.

What else might the campaign be hiding? Did Clinton lose consciousness? Does she have any other ailments? How often does she fall? In 2012, Clinton had another fall and suffered a concussion. Soon thereafter, she had a blood clot in the brain that was treated. Is that everything?

Nowadays, we tend to romanticize past presidents’ ailments — and how the mainstream media tended to cover them up — such as Franklin Roosevelt’s polio or John Kennedy’s battle with extreme pain and anxiety along with the powerful cocktails of drugs he took. The way these are often portrayed is that the illness did not affect the policies or performance of these presidents. But is that really true?

Consider Woodrow Wilson, who in 1919 suffered a severe stroke and was incapacitated for the remainder of his presidency. It was covered up, only to be pieced together later by historians, but if the 25th Amendment had been in place then it is highly possible he would have been deposed by his Cabinet for being physically and mentally unable to fulfill his duties of office.

These matters were and are so serious that countermeasures were put in place into the Constitution itself.

So, if the future president was going to have a potentially fatal illness, wouldn’t you want to know about it?

For Clinton, the issue could become a major headache going forward, particularly if voters perceive that she and her campaign sought to mislead the public about her health. In this case, Axelrod is right. Her illnesses can be treated, but the public faith and trust, once lost, will not easily recover.

"CONCEALING ONE'S true medical condition from the voting public," the historian Robert Dallek wrote in a 2002 essay, "is a time-honored tradition of the American presidency." During the presidential campaign of 1960, John F. Kennedy went to extreme lengths to hide from voters any hint of his severe medical problems, which ranged from Addison's disease to crippling spinal degeneration. By comparison, Hillary Clinton's recent dissembling over pneumonia and fainting spells is small potatoes.

Hillary Clinton staggered and apparently fainted after leaving a 9/11 memorial ceremony early on Sunday. Her campaign later acknowledged that she often suffers from dehydration, and had been diagnosed with pneumonia two days earlier.

Kennedy's deception succeeded not only because disclosure standards were so different in his time — public figures were accorded far more privacy than they are now — but also because he was a young man, just 42 when he ran for president. Candidates today can't expect to keep their medical problems secret, especially not candidates as old as Clinton (almost 69) and Donald Trump (70). Last month, the Clinton campaign snorted that Republicans questioning her health were peddling "deranged conspiracy theories." That won't fly anymore.

Already Democratic Party insiders are talking about having a Plan B ready in case Clinton's health problems become insurmountable. On Monday, former Democratic Party chairman Don Fowler urged the party to quickly set up a contingency plan to replace Clinton in case a medical crisis forces her from the race. "It's something you would be a fool not to prepare for," he told Politico.

No major-party presidential candidate has ever been forced by illness, or anything else, to quit the race after winning the nomination. But in 1972, the Democrats' vice-presidential nominee, Senator Thomas Eagleton of Missouri, had to drop out after it became known that he had been treated for depression with electroshock therapy. The DNC quickly regrouped, naming Sargent Shriver to take Eagleton's place. Now as then, it would be the responsibility of the party to fill any pre-election vacancy in its national ticket — regardless of whether the vacancy were caused by sickness, scandal, death, or mental debility. (Or, for that matter, by party leaders belatedly coming to their senses and realizing that a disastrous nominee was steering the Titanic straight for the iceberg.)

But suppose a vacancy materialized after the November election. Then the power to choose a replacement would no longer belong to the parties, but to the Electoral College.

Presidents are not elected directly by the people, but by state-based slates of electors. Under the Constitution, it is up to the states to appoint electors "in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct." Legislatures need not defer to the popular vote. They can, if they choose, name their state's electors directly, with instructions to vote for someone other than the candidate who won the most votes on Election Day.

Thomas Eagleton (L) was nominated by the 1972 Democratic convention to be George McGovern's running mate. But he was forced to leave the ticket once it became known that he had been treated for depression with electroshock therapy.

Clinton's collapse on Sept. 11 was quickly treated, and only a churl would wish her anything but a full recovery. But anything can happen. So far no president-elect has died, become incapacitated, or voluntarily withdrawn in the month and a half between the November election and the convening of the electors. It probably won't happen this year, either.

Yet if the 2016 cycle has taught us anything, it is to rule nothing out. With 70-year-old candidates, it isn't hard to imagine a serious medical crisis, such as a stroke or a massive heart attack, occurring just days after the election. Nor is it that hard — considering how ethically tainted the major-party nominees are — to imagine some devastating post-election revelation (perhaps via WikiLeaks) of wrongdoing or corruption that would make it unthinkable to allow the popular-vote winner to take the oath of office.

The Electoral College is routinely disparaged as undemocratic and archaic, but it exists for the excellent reason that mass democracy can go wrong. The people can be led wildly astray. Or they can make a choice that suddenly turns unviable. Or disaster can strike. Clinton's late-in-the-campaign illness may prove a mere blip. Still, it's a good opportunity to remind ourselves that the Framers built an escape hatch into the presidential election process. Even if voters screw the pooch on Nov. 8, the Electoral College can undo the damage.

Seventeen years ago, near the close of the 20th century, the typical American household had a higher income than it did in 2015.

The Census Bureau's annual report on income and poverty in the United States, released this week, did not focus on that fact. But it did note that real median household income was higher in 2015 than in 2014.

"Median household income was $56,516 in 2015, an increase in real terms of 5.2 percent from the 2014 median of $53,718," the report said in its "Highlights" section.

"This is the first annual increase in median household income since 2007, the year before the most recent recession," the report said.

In 2007 — nine years ago — real median household income (in constant 2015 dollars) was $57,423, according to Table A-1 in the report. America has not gotten back there yet.

In the nearly five decades between 1967 and 2015, according to that table, real median household income peaked in 1999 at $57,909. It has never been that high in the 21st century.

But the Census Bureau data also shows — as it has shown in the past — that some types of households tend to have higher incomes than others.

To modern American liberals, this would be evidence of a class war, where rich and evil people exploit the poor.

But the Census Bureau's Table FINC-01, which shows median household income by "characteristics of families," demonstrates something else.

In 2015, according to this table, "married couple families" had a median household income of $84,324. By contrast, families with a male householder and "no wife present" had a median income of only $49,895. Families with a female householder and "no husband present" had a median income of $34,126.

Families where the householder had a bachelor's degree had a median income of $103,224. By contrast, families where the householder had a high school degree had a median income of $52,906, and families where the householder had attended high school but not graduated had a median income of $32,906.

One lesson from the Census Bureau data: If you want to do better financially in the United States, earn a degree, get married, have kids and work. Another lesson: America needs a new era of economic growth.

Thursday, September 15, 2016

Is Hillary epileptic?

Those strange blue "sunglasses" Hillary has been wearing lately have now been identified as Zeiss f133 glasses, designed to prevent epileptic seizures. Can America afford an epileptic as Commander in Chief? Others are writing a lot on this (e.g. here) but you can be sure that vast efforts are being made to prevent any hard information getting out.

Even so, I think Hillary is finished. Her age has caught up with her. Those old bones can't hack it anymore -- unless she has a body double of course.

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Deconstructing "inclusivity"

Inclusivity is something of a buzzword on the Left these days. It has always seemed complete nonsense to me. You don't include golf players in football games or vice versa. Far from being a good thing, inclusivity would seem to create one big muddle. Different people need to be treated differently, not herded into one big corral. It only makes sense if you believe the absurd Leftist doctrine that all men are equal. They may all be equal in the sight of God -- to quote a famous political compromise -- but God's optometrical difficulties are not widely shared.

I regard myself as having had a blessed life and at age 73 still laugh my way through the day. I don't sound very jolly in my writing a lot of the time but who could be jolly in discussing the slimy con-men of the Left?

Yet, as I have previously set out at some length, I have lived most of my life in a state of great exclusion. And I am delighted that I was able to separate myself from uncongenial company. Because "inclusivity" was not forced down my throat, I was free to go my own way and do my own thing. When most of my fellow pupils at school were running around chasing balls, I was reading books. From infancy on, chasing balls is clearly one of humanity's greatest pleasures but I much preferred books. And I could do that. I could separate myself from other people. I lived happily outside the big Corral. And to this day I have quite a small social circle.

So the great good to me seems to be discrimination. Each of us is very discriminatory in choosing things as diverse as our wine and our life partners so being discriminatory in choosing our company should be optimal for our life satisfaction. We do best by excluding the unsuitable, not by including it.

I suppose at this stage I must seem like a bit of a moron. I have been treating the desirability of inclusion as a general proposition. I think one does need to look at it in such an objective way but, in reality, it is a very particular policy goal hiding behind a generally good-sounding name -- in the usual Leftist style. Candy-coating their destructive proposals is what Leftists do.

What inclusion is all about was brought home to me by this article. The language was inclusion but the starting point of the article was was outrage at the occasional deaths of unco-operative black criminals at the hands of the police. Voila! Being inclusive means being nicer to blacks! That is the whole meaning and purpose of the doctrine concerned. I am all in favour of everybody being nice to everyone else but being permissive towards criminals of any skin color seems grossly maladaptive to me. They should be excluded, not included.

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A defence of Trump

Trump is not the statesman I would have chosen for this moment. My preferences run toward Washington, Lincoln, Churchill, Reagan, and the like. Trump doesn’t measure up to any of them. But his flaws are overstated. One of the dumber things often said about Trump is that “you can’t trust him with the nuclear codes.” This statement, first, betrays a complete lack of understanding of nuclear command and control. More important, it’s an extraordinary calumny, one that accuses the man of a wish or propensity to commit mass murder on the scale of Pol Pot. On what basis does anyone make such an accusation? Can Trump be erratic, obnoxious, and offensive? Of course, he can be all that and more. But while these qualities are not virtues, they may well have helped him punch through the Overton Window, in which case I am willing to make allowances.

For this objection to be decisive, Trump’s personal immoderation would have to be on a level that aspires to tyrannical rule. I don’t see it. Not even close. The charge of “buffoon” seems a million times more apt than “tyrant.” And even so, one must wonder how buffoonish the alleged buffoon really is when he is right on the most important issues while so many others who are esteemed wise are wrong. Hillary Clinton launched the Libya war, perhaps the worst security policy mistake in US history—which divided a country between two American enemies and anarchy, and took a stream of refugees into Europe and surged it into a flood. She pledges to vastly increase the refugee flow from the Middle East into our communities (and, mark my words, they will be Red State communities). Trump by contrast promises not to launch misguided wars, to protect our borders, and to focus immigration policy on the well-being of the currently-constituted American people. Who is truly more moderate: the colorful loudmouth with the sensible agenda or the corrupt, icy careerist with the radical agenda?

Conservatives have shouted since the beginning of Trump’s improbable rise: He’s not one of us! He is not conservative! And, indeed, in many ways, Trump is downright liberal. You might think that would make him more acceptable to the Left. But no. As “compassionate conservatism” did nothing to blunt leftist hatred of George W. Bush, neither do Trump’s quasi-liberal economic positions. In fact, they hate Trump much more. Trump is not conservative enough for the conservatives but way too conservative for the Left, yet somehow they find common cause. Earlier I posited that the reason is Trump’s position on immigration. Let me add two others.

The first is simply that Trump might win. He is not playing his assigned role of gentlemanly loser the way McCain and Romney did, and may well have tapped into some previously untapped sentiment that he can ride to victory. This is a problem for both the Right and the Left. The professional Right (correctly) fears that a Trump victory will finally make their irrelevance undeniable. The Left knows that so long as Republicans kept playing by the same rules and appealing to the same dwindling base of voters, there was no danger. Even if one of the old breed had won, nothing much would have changed, since their positions on the most decisive issues were effectively the same as the Democrats and because they posed no serious challenge to the administrative state.

Which points to the far more important reason. The current governing arrangement of the United States is rule by a transnational managerial class in conjunction with the administrative state. To the extent that the parties are adversarial at the national level, it is merely to determine who gets to run the administrative state for four years. Challenging the administrative state is out of the question. The Democrats are united on this point. The Republicans are at least nominally divided. But those nominally opposed (to the extent that they even understand the problem, which is: not much) are unwilling or unable to actually do anything about it. Are challenges to the administrative state allowed only if they are guaranteed to be ineffectual? If so, the current conservative movement is tailor-made for the task. Meanwhile, the much stronger Ryan wing of the Party actively abets the administrative state and works to further the managerial class agenda.

Trump is the first candidate since Reagan to threaten this arrangement. To again oversimplify, the question here is: who rules? The many or the few? The people or the oligarchs? Our Constitution says: the people are sovereign, and their rule is mediated through representative institutions, limited by written Constitutional norms. The administrative state says: experts must rule because various advances (the march of history) have made governing too complicated for public deliberation, and besides, the unwise people often lack knowledge of their own best interests even on rudimentary matters. When the people want something that they shouldn’t want or mustn’t have, the administrative state prevents it, no matter what the people vote for. When the people don’t want something that the administrative state sees as salutary or necessary, it is simply imposed by fiat.

Don’t want more immigration? Too bad, we know what’s best. Think bathrooms should be reserved for the two biological sexes? Too bad, we rule. And so on and on.

To all the “conservatives” yammering about my supposed opposition to Constitutional principle (more on that below) and who hate Trump, I say: Trump is mounting the first serious national-political defense of the Constitution in a generation. He may not see himself in those terms. I believe he sees himself as a straightforward patriot who just wants to do what is best for his country and its people. Whatever the case, he is asserting the right of the sovereign people to make their government do what they want it to do, and not do things they don’t want it to do, in the teeth of determined opposition from a managerial class and administrative state that wants not merely different policies but above all to perpetuate their own rule.

If the Constitution has any force or meaning, then “We the People” get to decide not merely who gets to run the administrative state—which, whatever the outcome, will always continue on the same path—more fundamentally, we get to decide what policies we want and which we don’t. Apparently, to the whole Left and much of the Right, this stance is immoderate and dangerous. The people who make that charge claim to do so in defense of Constitutional principle. I can’t square that circle. Can you?

(To those tempted to accuse me of advocating a crude majoritarianism, I refer you to what I said above and will say below on the proper, Constitutional operation of the United States government as originally designed and improved by the pre-Progressive Amendments.)

One must also wonder what is so “immoderate” about Trump’s program. As noted, it’s to the left of the last several decades of Republican-conservative orthodoxy. “Moderate” in the modern political (as opposed to the Aristotelean) sense tends to be synonymous with “centrist.” By that definition, Trump is a moderate. That’s why National Review and the rest of the conservatives came out of the gate so strongly against him. I admit that, not all that long ago, I probably would have too. But I have come to see conservatism in a different light. To oversimplify (again), the only “eternal principle” is the good. What, specifically, is good in a political context varies with the times and with circumstance, as does how best to achieve the good in a given context. The good is not tax rates or free trade. Those aren’t even principles. In the American political context, the good is the well-being of the physical America and its people, well-being defined (in terms that reflect both Aristotle and the American founding) as their “safety and happiness.” That’s what conservatism should be working to conserve.

Trump seems to grasp that the best way to do so in these times is to promote more solidarity and unity. The “conservatives” by contrast think it means more individualism. Neither of these, either, is an eternal principle. Prudence calls for a balance. Few would want the maximized (and forced) unity of ancient Sparta or modern North Korea. Only fool libertarians seek the maximized individualism of Ayn Rand. No unity means no nation. No individualism means no liberty. In an actual republic, a balance must be maintained, which can require occasional course corrections. In 1980, after a decade of stagnation, we needed an infusion of individualism. In 2016, we are too fragmented and atomized—united for the most part only by being equally under the thumb of the administrative state—and desperately need more unity.

Which means that Trump, right now, is right and the conservatives are wrong. His moderate program of secure borders, economic nationalism, and America-first foreign policy—all things that liberals and conservatives alike used to take for granted, if they disagreed on implementation—holds the promise of fostering more unity. But today, liberals are apoplectic at the mere mention of this program—controlling borders is “extreme” but a “borderless world” is the “ultimate wisdom”—and the Finlandized conservatives aid them in attacking the candidate who promotes it. Conservatives claim to deplore the way the Democrats slice and dice the electorate, reduce it to voting blocks and interest groups, and stoke resentments to boost turnout. But faced with a candidate explicitly running on a unity agenda they insist he is too extreme to trust with the reins of power. One wants to ask, again: which is it, conservatives? Is Trump to be rejected because he is too moderate or because he is too extreme? The answer appears to be that it doesn’t matter, so long as Trump is rejected.

So that’s my “immoderate” case for Trump: do things that are in the interests of lower, working, and middle class Americans in order to improve their lives and increase unity across all swaths and sectors of society. And in so doing, reassert the people’s rightful, Constitutional control of their government. “Dangerous.” “Extreme.” “Radical.” “Poison.” “Authoritarian.”

Wednesday, September 14, 2016

15 Years After 9/11 We’re Less Safe, Less Free

September 11 marks the 15th anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. As with the assassination of JFK and the attack on Pearl Harbor, 9/11 will forever be seen as a critical moment in American history.

For those who lived through the 9/11 attacks the anniversary brings up many unpleasant memories. I was young—a junior high school student. Our teachers told us there had been an attack, but refused to discuss it further. It was not until I got home and turned on the television that I began to understand that I was seeing something unlike anything I’d ever encountered.

Like many Americans, I was scared and worried about what the terrorist acts would mean for our country. I remember asking my parents if there would be more attacks and if there were terrorists living in the United States. I wondered what I would do if I or someone I loved was a victim of an attack. Although they tried to be comforting, it was clear my parents didn’t have the answers.

Lucky for me and other Americans, the chance of being killed (or even injured) in an act of terror is remarkably low—about one in 20 million. You are more likely to die while moving your couch, or from being struck by lightning, from falling out of bed, from the flu, or from brain-eating parasites!

Some would argue that this illustrates that government has done a good job since 9/11. Consider, however, that the number of Americans killed in terror attacks on an annualized basis has remained remarkably constant and low over several decades, with a few exceptions like 9/11. In the period from 1995 through 2014, for example, seven years saw no deaths in the United States related to terrorism. In six other years, one to four Americans were killed on U.S. soil in “terror-related” incidents. Even looking worldwide, the number of Americans killed in terror attacks pales in comparison to other causes of death. In 2013 just under 2.6 million U.S. citizens died. Thirteen of these deaths were terror-related, 0.0005 percent of all deaths. In 2001, taking into account the deaths from the 9/11 attacks, terror deaths still represented less than 0.2 percent of all U.S. deaths.

Yet despite these comforting numbers, Americans are less safe and less free than they were 15 years ago. The danger comes not from terrorism, but rather from the U.S. government. The War on Terror has enabled massive government expansion. The cost is not “just” the nearly $2 trillion in taxpayer money, but our liberty.

Consider that during the last 15 years, U.S. government has spied (and continues to spy) on U.S. citizens and international leaders. The U.S. government has used “enhanced interrogation,” otherwise known as torture, to combat terrorism. These techniques are not exclusively used in foreign combat zones, however. Recent investigations of the Chicago Police Department, for example, indicate that local governments have employed these same techniques at home, not against terrorists but against US. citizens.

Drones and other forms of extrajudicial killing are now standard practice. These activities not only fail to eliminate terror threats, but provide a rallying cry and recruitment tool for terrorist organizations, making Americans at home and abroad less safe. The push to use drone technology domestically by state and local law enforcement has substantial consequences for privacy. Militarized police, now on the “front lines” of the war on terror at home, have trampled the rights of Americans with a barrage of “no-knock” raids and unauthorized surveillance.

Moreover, those who speak out against these activities, whistleblowers who expose the wrongdoings of the U.S. government, are labeled as un-American, anti-military or even traitors, and punished. Meanwhile, questionable and perhaps illegal activity by government officials goes unchecked.

Many Americans look outside of the United States to determine who represents the biggest threat to freedom and safety. Fifteen years after 9/11, we’d do well to realize that the largest threat to our liberties comes not from people thousands of miles away but from our own government.

In a speech Friday at the Values Voter Summit in Washington, D.C., American Values Founder and President Gary Bauer said that former President Theodore Roosevelt banned Muslims during his presidency by prohibiting immigration to the U.S. of anyone who believed in polygamy, promoted it or lived in a country that practiced it.

“Donald Trump has been crucified, because a number of months ago, he said that we ought to have a pause in Muslim immigration to the United States, and it took about 10 minutes for the president and quite frankly, a number of Republican leaders to run to a microphone and basically say that’s not who we are. That’s not our values. Well they’re wrong,” Bauer said.

“Teddy Roosevelt enforced the law during his presidency that prohibited immigration to the United States of anybody who believed in polygamy, promoted polygamy, or lived in a country that practiced polygamy. Who do you think he was trying to keep out of the country, Episcopalians?” Bauer asked.

According to the Department of Homeland Security’s website, the Immigration Act of 1891 barred “the immigration of polygamists, persons convicted of crimes of moral turpitude, and those suffering loathsome or contagious diseases.”

“How about Jimmy Carter, that well known right wing bigoted extremist, right? Jimmy Carter, who the guy I worked for, Ronald Reagan, clobbered on Election Day, Jimmy Carter, after the Iranian Revolution, announced that effective immediately there would be no more immigration from Iran into the United States, but that’s not all,” Bauer said.

In 1980, Carter announced that the U.S. was breaking diplomatic relations with Iran and ordered all Iranian diplomats and officials to leave the country by midnight the next day, according to an April 8, 1980 article in The Crimson. This was 157 days into the Iran hostage crisis. Fifty Americans were held hostage by militants occupying the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. At the time, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini ruled that the Americans must stay with the militants until the new Iranian Parliament decided their fate.

“Jimmy Carter went on national TV and said, there are 25,000 Iranian students attending our universities. You have 30 days to report to your closest immigration center with your papers. He expelled thousands of Iranian university students from the United States,” Bauer said. “That was weakling, left-wing, Democrat Jimmy Carter.

“And today, taking that commonsense position gets you attacked the way Trump is attacked. It’s unbelievable what’s happening in this country,” he said, referring to GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump’s initial proposal to ban Muslims from entering the country.

“Donald Trump has done a little bit more on his proposal. Now he says that he’s gonna really zero in on a handful of countries, and that’s fine – countries where there’s a lot of terrorist activity, etcetera, but then he said something else that again set people off on a tirade,” Bauer said.

“He said we’re going to start having an ideological test. Of course we should. The Pew Research Center did a study of the Muslim world and found that it is permeated with hatred of Jews, of Christians, rejection of religious liberty. Why would we import that to the United States?” Bauer asked.

Bauer said the world has been “cursed with leaders that at best are clueless” when it comes to combatting terrorism.

“We have been cursed with leaders that at best are clueless,” Bauer said, pointing to President Barack Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. “How do you explain Merkel in Germany, who doesn’t have an unexpected influx of young Muslim migrants coming to the country?

“She invites them in, and a million of them accept her invitation, pouring across the borders, and then in the weeks and months that follow, Merkel expresses surprise and shock that German women are being molested and raped,” Bauer said.

“What did she think would happen when you bring in hundreds of thousands of young men from third world countries that have been taught in their houses of worship that infidel women are all whores and you could do to them what you want to do? That’s who she invited into Germany,” he said.

“How about in France, where after the brutal attack in Nice, families run over by a jihadist in a truck, empty carriages littered all over the beach where babies used to be sitting, and a French government official says, ‘well, this is almost impossible to stop. The French people may just have to get used to tolerating a certain level of terrorism in our pluralistic country,’” Bauer said.

“And then there’s President Obama. My gosh, if I’d shared with you all of his contributions to helping us understand what is going on, I’d be speaking through the rest of my time and the next two speakers,” Bauer said.

“A few months ago, he had this really incredible insight to share with us. The president said you America, you Americans have more risk of drowning in a bathtub, he said, than you do of being killed by terrorists. Well thank you, Mr. President, for that incredible insight. Churchill, he ain’t,” Bauer added.

“I guess my reaction would be that when my bathtub starts yelling Allah Akbar and trying to kill me, I’ll start worrying about baths, but right now, I’m going to worry about the people, whose numbers are growing ladies and gentleman, who have declared war on western civilization – Judeo-Christian civilization,” he said.

Bauer then referenced Kerry’s comments Bangladesh in August during a press availability in Dhaka.

“Secretary Kerry a couple weeks ago went to a conference in Europe – don’t want to leave him out. This was a conference on the importance of open societies, and he brought the crowd – many of them journalists and government officials - to their feet in raucous applause when he said if the media would just stop reporting the terror attacks, the impact they have would be lessened,” Bauer said.

“He offered no guidance on what reporters should do when they come across the mass graves. Should they not report those either? Cause if you report that they just found another grave with a thousand dead Christians in it or Yazidis or other religious minorities, people might go, Wow, that’s big news. Who killed them?” Bauer added.

Marking the end of a 10-year legal battle, a Houston jury today ruled in favor of Professional Janitorial Services and against the SEIU, ordering the union to pay $5.3 million in damages for the union’s campaign to drive away the company’s business.

The “Kill PJS” campaign was a three-year effort by the SEIU to do exactly what the name suggests. Throughout that time, the union implemented a three pronged strategy of media collaboration, baseless lawsuits, and union-planted employees in an effort to drive customers away from the janitorial company.

“The jury found what PJS and its employees have known for more than a decade, which is that SEIU is a corrupt organization that is rotten to its core,” said Brent Southwell, CEO of PJS. “The next step is to ensure the union is removed from Texas and sent packing back to Chicago.”

Founded in Chicago, the Service Employees International Union is a DC-based union with deep ties to the Obama administration.

Throughout the four week trial, jurors learned of false allegations, threatening tactics, and an all-out smear campaign waged by the SEIU against the janitorial company for one simple reason— PJS refused to allow the union to organize its workforce of janitors without a secret ballot election.

In a statement, PJS added that they “will now ask local prosecutors to investigate apparent perjury by union officials and an attorney who testified in the trial, and will increase its efforts with state legislators to remove the SEIU from eligibility in state-provided union dues collection programs.”

The PJS trial was the first time the union’s tactics were brought in front of a jury, as other companies have opted to settle their cases and avoid a trial.

Today’s ruling sends a clear message that unions who attempt to use corrupt tactics and political connections to pressure business owners into giving in to their demands will no longer be tolerated in the Lone Star State.

Tuesday, September 13, 2016

Fifteen Years after 9/11, and America Still Sleeps

How much worse will the destruction and death have to be to wake us up?

Fifteen years after the carnage of 9/11, American foreign policy is still mired in its fossilized dogmas and dangerous delusions. The consequences are obvious. Iran, the world's foremost state sponsor of terrorism and long an avowed enemy of the United States, has filled the vacuum of our ignominious retreat from the Middle East, even as the mullahs move ever closer to possessing nuclear weapons. Russia, Iran's improbable ally, bombs civilians in Syria, kills the Syrian fighters we have trained, bullies its neighbor Ukraine, consolidates its take-over of the Crimea, and relentlessly pursues its interests with disregard for international law and contempt for our feeble protests. Iraq, for which thousands of Americans bled and died, is now a puppet state of Iran. Afghanistan is poised to be overrun by the Taliban in a few years, and ISIS, al Qaeda 2.0, continues to inspire franchises throughout the world and to murder European and American citizens.

So much for the belief, frequently heard in the months after the attacks of 9/11, that "this changes everything." The smoking ruins and 3000 dead surely had awoken us from our delusions that the "end of history" and a "new world order" had followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, "a world in which nations recognize the shared responsibility for freedom and justice. A world where the strong respect the rights of the weak," as George H.W. Bush said in 1990. The following decade seemed to confirm this optimism. Didn't we quickly slap down the brutal Saddam Hussein and stop his aggression against his neighbors? Didn't we punish the Serbs for their revanchist depredations in the Balkans? With American military power providing the muscle, the institutions of international cooperation like NATO, the International Court of Justice, and the U.N. Security Council would patrol and protect the network of new democracies that were set to evolve into versions of Western nations and enjoy such boons as individual rights, political freedom, leisure and prosperity, tolerance for minorities, equality for women, and a benign secularism.

The gruesome mayhem of 9/11 should have alerted us to the fact many Muslims didn't get the memo about history's demise. Indeed, long before that tragic day in September, we had been serially warned that history still had some unpleasant surprises. Theorists of neo-jihadism like Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb for decades had laid out the case for war against the infidel West and its aggression against Islam. "It is the nature of Islam," al-Banna wrote, "to dominate not to be dominated, to impose its laws on all nations and extend its power to the entire planet." So too the leader of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the Ayatollah Khomeini: "Those who study jihad will understand why Islam wants to conquer the whole world," which is why "Islam says: Kill all the unbelievers." The kidnapping of U.S. diplomatic personnel in Tehran by a group called "Muslim Students Following the Line of the Imam [Khomeini]" sent us a message that we were engaged in the religious war the jihadists warned would come. But few of those responsible for our security and interests had ears to hear or eyes to see.

Not even when the words became bloody deeds did we listen. The bombing of the Beirut Marine barracks in 1983, which killed 241 servicemen, was supported by Iran and executed by its proxy terrorist group Hezbollah. Our refusal to respond reflected our failure to take seriously Khomeini's vow to spread his revolution to the whole world. The humiliating televised abuse of our dead soldiers in Mogadishu in 1993, followed by our withdrawal, was exploited by Osama bin Laden in his sermons as signs that America had "foundations of straw." That same year came the first World Trade Center attack, which killed six and wounded 1,042, an operation inspired by al Qaeda and traditional jihadist doctrine. In 1995 five Americans were killed by al Qaeda operatives at a training facility in Riyadh. In 1996 a truck bomb exploded in front of a residential complex housing Air Force personnel near Dhahran, killing 19 Americans. In 1998 al Qaeda bombed our embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. Twelve Americans died in Nairobi. And the last warning came in October of 2000, when the destroyer Cole was attacked by a fishing boat loaded with explosive. Seventeen sailors died and 39 were wounded.

Yet during these two decades of attacks that proved the jihadists' words were not just bluster, we did little in response. We interpreted the attacks as crimes, not battles in a war, and reflections of poverty, autocracy, or vague "evil," rather than as the fulfillment of Allah's divine commands. Instead, Clinton launched cruise missiles that made a lot of noise but accomplished nothing, limited as those attacks were by timid rules of engagement. His foreign policy was internationalist and idealist, seeing the spread of democracy and the promotion of human rights as paramount in foreign affairs. America's presence needed to be reduced in the world, and the use of force should be a last resort, and even then carefully calibrated to avoid international condemnation and American casualties. "Dialogue" and "outreach" were preferable, for the jihadists were just defending "traditional values," as one State Department official said. The wages of that delusion were the burned and dismembered bodies in Manhattan, the Pentagon, and a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

This history is worth reviewing, for all these mistakes, these failures of imagination, these indulgences of naïve idealism, these sacrifices of our security and interests to political advantage, all comprise the "everything" that 9/11 was supposed to "change." But here we are, fifteen years later, with a similar history of folly. George W. Bush pursued a delusional program of democracy promotion in Iraq and Afghanistan, with scant appreciation for the profound cultural differences between Islam and the West. But he at least left his successor a stabilized Iraq, which Obama quickly abandoned just to fulfill a campaign promise and assert his progressive bona fides. Then Obama blustered that Syria's "Assad has to go" and laid down "red lines" that were not to be crossed, only to do nothing when they were serially crossed, and to sacrifice this country's credibility in his pursuit of the disastrous deal with Iran, our inveterate enemy stained with four decades' worth of American blood. ISIS was allowed to flourish in the vacuum created by our withdrawal, creating a Hobbesian war of all against all, whose beneficiaries so far have been our rival Russia and our sworn enemy Iran.

Perhaps worst of all, Obama has turned jihad denial into a fatal disease. He is not alone in this delusion, for "religion of peace" and "nothing to do with Islam" have been mantras chanted by our foreign policy savants going back to the Iranian Revolution. No matter that al-Banna, Qutb, Khomeini, bin Laden, Ayman al Zawahiri, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and the mullahs in Iran all have grounded their violence and aggression in Islamic scripture and tradition. Our smug Western analysts and apologists dismiss the jihadists' exegesis as a "hijacking" or "distortion" of the "true" Islam, presuming to understand the Islamic faith better than pious Muslims do. So we half-heartedly fight an enemy whose name we cannot even say, and whose religion of violence we desperately distort into a religion of peace and tolerance. Meanwhile, like Bill Clinton and now Obama, we use bombs and drones as telegenic marketing tools to hide our failure of nerve and short-sighted political calculations.

So fifteen years later, we still sleep. And don't expect things to change after November. Neither candidate has shown any indication he or she is willing to make the hard decisions required to destroy ISIS and reaffirm American prestige. Trump issues vague threats about "bombing the shit" out of ISIS, while Hillary chatters about "smart power" and "coalitions," doubling down on Obama's failing policy. But no one proposes using the mind-concentrating levels of force, including troops as well as bombs, necessary to repair our broken foreign policy in the Middle East. Too many voters are in an isolationist mood, sick of wars and casualties, and concerned more about jobs and the economy.

The attacks on 9/11 supposedly "changed everything." When it comes to foreign policy, they didn't. One shudders to think how much worse the destruction and death will have to be to wake us up.

‘Socialism of the 21st Century’ Collapses in Brazil. Here’s Why It Failed

With the Senate impeachment vote to remove from office former President Dilma Rousseff, Brazilians joined a lengthening line of Latin Americans who have soured on the populist, corrupting, and impoverishing policies of “21st Century Socialism.”

Faced with its disastrous consequences, people in some neighboring countries had already turned the page and moved on. Argentina wised up late last year and installed center-right President Mauricio Macri after more than a decade of misrule by the Peronist Kirchner family.

Earlier this year, Peruvians voted for a 78-year-old center-right economist to get them back on track. And in Caracas, Venezuela, tens of thousands took to the streets demanding the removal of the brutally fascistic regime put in power by one of 21st Century Socialism’s founding fathers, the late Hugo Chávez.

In Brazil, government spending programs championed by Rousseff and her socialist mentor and predecessor, “Lula” da Silva, only managed to pull Brazilians out of poverty temporarily, through cash transfers and welfare benefits that ended up nearly bankrupting the country and plunging it into its deepest recession since the 1930s.

After squandering many opportunities during the era of booming commodity prices, these countries now face the difficult—but necessary—structural reform process to remove the real obstacles that have limited productivity growth and thwarted convergence with more advanced economies.

Many of these reforms are detailed in The Heritage Foundation’s newly published “2017 Global Agenda for Economic Freedom.” They include:

Stronger protection of property rights and more effective anti-corruption measures.

Reduction of support for massively subsidized state-owned enterprises that are especially toxic breeding grounds for cronyism and favoritism (e.g. Petrobras in Brazil).

By taking these steps under new President Michel Temer, Brazil can soon make strides to raise its scores in the annual Heritage Foundation Index of Economic Freedom and, more importantly, make sustainable improvements to the living standards of its millions of citizens.

Rousseff’s downfall was sealed when it was revealed that she and her socialist PT political party had cooked the budget books to boost vote-buying spending measures in advance of her squeaker re-election victory in the 2014 presidential election. Now, Brazilians have slammed those books closed and opened the door to greater prosperity in a post-socialist Latin America.

Our Commander-in-Chief, Barack Hussein Obama, is out to sabotage the U.S. Military. His deliberate actions have exposed this great nation to dangers never before seen in our history.

At first I thought it was mere incompetence. But now I can see it for what it really is.

Obama's every move is designed to deplete our military, bring our armed forces to their knees and establish him as Ruler.

His sneaky actions are unparalleled and pose a HUGE threat to the future of our military and the safety of our entire nation.

Right under our noses, Obama has purged a huge number of senior military officials from top positions in our armed forces.

Last year alone, he "relieved of duty" nine generals and flag officers -- making a total of over 200 top-class officers fired since he came to office in 2009, including nine very powerful generals and admirals in the past year alone.

The question is: Why?

One veteran Army intel officer shared the reason. He said that Obama wants a "compliant officer class" and "it's getting harder and harder to find senior officers with a pair of b*lls above the rank of major" because above that rank "it's all politics."

That's right. Our mighty U.S. Military is being purged by a former dope-smoking, terrorist-loving, communist-sympathizing, America-hating hippy.

Monday, September 12, 2016

Trump is sounding better

BY ROGER KIMBALL

I think Publius is right that the demonization of the Right would only accelerate in a Hillary Clinton administration. Which brings Publius—and me—to Donald Trump. “Yes, Trump is worse than imperfect, “ he admits. “So what? We can lament until we choke the lack of a great statesman to address the fundamental issues of our time.” Publius goes further than I would. “Trump,” he says,

"alone among candidates for high office in this or in the last seven (at least) cycles, has stood up to say: I want to live. I want my party to live. I want my country to live. I want my people to live. I want to end the insanity"

There were others, in my opinion, who fit this bill, including Ted Cruz. But Ted Cruz is not a candidate for the presidency in 2016. Donald Trump is. Which brings me back to my second thoughts about Trump. As recently as a few weeks back, I was a lesser-of-two-evils, reluctant Trump supporter: classic Russian roulette vs. the loaded semi-automatic that is a Hillary Clinton victory.

But then Trump embarked on a series of high-profile speeches and rallies. I liked what he said about taxes and economic policy. I liked his list of possible SCOTUS nominees. I liked what he said about supporting the police and the plight of blacks in the inner cities. I liked what he said about combatting Islamic terrorism (what Barack Obama calls “workplace violence”). I even liked most of what he said in his immigration speech in Arizona. I thought it was courageous and “presidential” for him to meet with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto. I thought he did the right thing in going to lend moral, and even a bit of material, support to the victims of the floods in Louisiana. I was grateful when he released a video commemorating the canonization of Mother Teresa. I was happy to see him supporting school choice, standing up for religious freedom, and criticizing those who mock Christians and people of faith.

I know there will be some who object, “But how do you know he will do all things things.” The answer is, I don’t.

But I do know what Hillary would do: Obama on steroids. She’s a known-known. She would, as Publius warns, complete the “fundamental transformation” of this country into a third-world, politically correct socialist redoubt.

There is a fair amount of hysteria among NeverTrumpers about “The Flight 93 Election,” which I guess underscores just how potent its argument is. (The fact that Rush Limbaugh read it aloud on his radio show redoubled that potency.) As I say, I’ve come around to thinking that there are plenty of good reasons for someone of conservative principles to support Trump. I know, and have repeatedly rehearsed, the standard litany of criticisms about Trump. But they fade if not into insignificance then at least into near irrelevance in the face of his actual program (see above) and, most of all, in the face of the horror that is his opponent. I’ll give the last word to Publius: “The election of 2016 is a test . . . of whether there is any virtù left in what used to be the core of the American nation. If they cannot rouse themselves simply to vote for the first candidate in a generation who pledges to advance their interests, and to vote against the one who openly boasts that she will do the opposite (a million more Syrians, anyone?), then they are doomed. They may not deserve the fate that will befall them, but they will suffer it regardless.”

The great James Burnham once remarked that where there is no alternative there is no problem. Fortunately, we do have an alternative, and, my, we do have a problem. I was wrong when I predicted that Donald Trump would not be the candidate. I hope I will be proved wrong about my prediction that, were he the candidate, he would not win. The trends are promising, I think, but it would be foolish to deny that there are madmen in the cockpit or that many of the passengers are scared, apathetic, deluded, or just plain cowardly. We need a real-life Decius Mus who is willing to say “Let’s roll” and make a concerted charge. It may be the last chance we have.

With the publication in 2012 of Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, political scientist Charles Murray – celebrated and denigrated in equal measure for his earlier works, Losing Ground (1984) and The Bell Curve (1994) – produced a searing, searching analysis of a nation cleaving along the lines of class, a nation, as he put it, ‘coming apart at the seams’. On the one side of this conflicted society, as Murray sees it, there is the intellectual or ‘cognitive’ elite, graduates of America’s leading universities, bound together through marriage and work, and clustered together in the same exclusive zipcodes, places such as Beverly Hills, Santa Monica and Boston.

In these communities of the likeminded, which Murray gives the fictional title of ‘Belmont’, the inhabitants share the same values, the same moral outlook, the same distinct sense of themselves as superior. And on the other side, there is the ‘new lower class’, the white Americans who left education with no more than a high-school diploma, who increasingly divorce among themselves, endure unemployment together, and are gathered in neighbourhoods that Murray gives the title of ‘Fishtown’ – inspired by an actual white, blue-collar neighbourhood of the same name in Philadelphia.

It is in Fishtown that the trends Murray identifies as the most damaging over the past 50 years – family breakdown, loss of employment, crime and a loss of social capital – are felt and experienced. Its inhabitants have a set of values (albeit threadbare ones), an outlook and a way of life that are entirely at odds with those from Belmont. And it is between these two almost entirely distinct moral communities, that the new Culture Wars now appear to be being fought. Sean Collins caught up with Murray to talk about the cultural drivers of this latent class conflict; how it plays into the rise of Trump; and what can be done about this dangerous division

Sean Collins: In Coming Apart, you argue that the top and bottom of American society are divided culturally as well as economically. Fishtown is not only poorer than Belmont, but engages in different cultural practices, and has different values. For example, the value placed on marriage and religion differs among the people in your two archetypal towns. What forces have created this divide? To what extent have economic trends, such as a lack of employment opportunities, contributed to the divide?

Charles Murray: In Coming Apart I deliberately avoided talking about causes, and the reason for that was to enable people on the left to read the book without giving up on it. In my own view, many of the left’s policies, starting in the 1960s, contributed to this breakdown. They contributed to the breakdown of the family; they contributed to rising crime; they indirectly contributed to declining religiosity; and, above all, they contributed to the withdrawal of a lot of males from the labour force. Those policies weren’t the only causes, but I didn’t want to talk about those I had discussed in an earlier book, Losing Ground. Instead, I wanted my audience to confront the fact that this division between top and bottom had occurred.

However, in terms of the forces driving this division, I would say the economy’s role has been vastly overstated. My reasons for saying that are, first, that we have had a natural experiment. We have had prolonged periods in the US where the job market has been tight, with more jobs than workers: we had scattered years in the 1970s, for instance; then we had a period in the mid 1980s, during the second term of the Reagan administration; and, most obviously, in the latter half of the 1990s, labour markets were very tight. Yet during all of this time we saw the low-skilled, poorly educated workers of Fishtown drop out of the labour force. If the labour market was to blame, then presumably males would have come back into the labour market during those periods – they did not. The decline slowed somewhat during those periods, but it did not reverse. So, when people say, ‘oh, we can solve this problem by creating plenty of jobs at good pay’, I say, we tried that. You have to tell me what is going to be different about a tight labour market in the future, that was different from, say, the latter half of the 1990s.

I think the much larger changes in the culture were driven by, as I mentioned, a variety of social policies that I discussed in Losing Ground. But I should add to those a couple of others. First, the invention of the birth control pill, which liberated women from the fear of pregnancy and generated a sexual revolution. This led to a situation in which males’ incentives for marriage changed. A major incentive for a young male to marry prior to 1960 was to have regular sexual access to a woman, which was hard to do at that time if you were not wealthy or otherwise in a fortunate position.

So are working-class Americans angry? Yeah. And is Trump a vehicle for expressing that anger? Absolutely

Second, feminism. Women were able to get into the labour market in ways they had not before. It was a good thing to happen, but it also fundamentally changed the role and status of the working-class male. So before the entrance of women into the workplace, he could say ‘I am the head of the family; I am putting food on the table, and a roof over the heads of my children’, which gave him not only a personal sense of satisfaction, but also a status within the community. But the role and status of males changed when so many women started to become economically independent of men.

So, it’s a classic case of many forces creating the problem I described in Coming Apart. Forces which were progressive – I’m glad that the feminist revolution occurred, I’m glad that better contraception was available for women. But they had collateral effects which were problematic.

Collins: You paint a fairly bleak picture of life in Fishtown. People are not only poor but despairing, and otherwise leading difficult lives. Do you think the elite is to blame for Fishtown? Do the people of Fishtown have any culpability for their situation?

Murray: The people of Fishtown have a lot of responsibility for what’s gone on. If you go to a Fishtown in the US – that includes lots of small towns in the Midwest and West, as well as urban working-class neighbourhoods – you will see, for example, lots of healthy, able-bodied males in their twenties and thirties, who are not working. They are not looking for work; they do not take jobs if they are available; and they spend their lives essentially playing video games. That’s not really an exaggeration. The statistics on the number of hours spent by these guys on video games are stunning.

Now, it is a classic argument of the left to say, ‘ah, they are demoralised. They are not responsible for their decisions.’ And I agree, in some sense they are demoralised. But I also do not want to deprive them of moral agency. They have the option to behave differently. There are people in those same communities who are behaving differently. There are men who are in the labour market, are employed, are doing the right thing. So, if you talk about the new lower class, there are two points to make. One, do forces outside the control of the people in those communities have a bearing on their lives? Absolutely. Two, does that excuse them from the choices they make, to live off of others – girlfriends, parents, friends, the government? No, it does not excuse them from making those choices.

Collins: Coming Apart was published in 2012. Have the culture divisions you identified in the book persisted? Have they evolved at all?

Murray: The divisions have continued to get worse, but not that rapidly. For example, if you look at the marriage rate for guys in their thirties and forties, it hasn’t fallen much more than had it done when I compiled my data (in 2010) for Coming Apart. So have things gotten a lot worse over the past six years? Not a lot, but they have gotten worse. The thing that I did not pick up on in Coming Apart was the decline in working-class women’s labour-force participation, which is quite pronounced. I did look at women’s labour participation while writing Coming Apart, but my breakdowns did not trigger the recognition of how large that reduction was. So, it’s not just demoralisation among men any more; it’s demoralisation among women as well, and that’s been going on since the early 2000s. That’s one thing which I think has probably gotten worse.

Also, I should add, that there was a confirmation of the radical change that’s going on, in the work of the Nobel Prize-winner Angus Deaton and his co-author, Anne Case, who documented an astonishing rise in death rates among lower-class whites, from diseases related to addiction, substance abuse, and so on. This trend is also an indirect indicator of a huge cultural change for the worse in working-class America.

Collins: Do you see the culture divides and trends you identified in Coming Apart as contributing to the rise of Donald Trump?

Murray: Yes, I do. There are two developments. First, if you look at those people who are out of the labour force – what I call the ‘new lower class’ – they are no longer participating in the major institutions of American society. To put it crudely, I think they look upon Trump as sticking it to the man in a way they find gratifying. But I think they also look upon this as entertainment. I’m exaggerating to some extent, but there’s a sentiment of ‘well, this is a really interesting reality show, look at what this guy is getting away with, with all his outrageous stuff – let’s see what happens next’.

The elites are promulgating policies for which they do not pay the price. That’s true of immigration, that’s true of education

Then you have other people in the white working class who are getting married, holding jobs, playing by the rules – and they are pissed as hell. They see all of these shenanigans among the elites, the Wall Street types, for instance, with their 20,000-square-foot mansions. And most aggravating of all, they have to suffer the cognitive elite’s incredible smugness and condescension. The elites don’t even bother to hide this condescension towards the white working class. They are constantly making fun of rednecks, of evangelical Christians. And they talk about ‘flyover country’, as if nothing between the East Coast and West Coast really makes any difference. Indeed, cognitive elites are contemptuous of the working class. At the same time, working-class people, trying hard to makes ends meet, are being faced with an awful lot of competition for work from an influx of low-skilled, immigrant labour – an influx that the elites have encouraged and done nothing to stop. So, are they angry? Yeah. And is Trump a vehicle for expressing that anger? Absolutely.

Sunday, September 11, 2016

The ‘False Economy’

With Donald Trump’s use over Labor Day of the phrase the “false economy” we finally have a candidate who is getting to the bottom of the so-called Obama recovery. On the one hand the President’s approval ratings are above 50%. On the other hand, vast majorities think the country is moving in the wrong direction. Official unemployment is below 5%, but because the job participation rate is at its lowest point in decades. The government has racked up more debt than all previous administrations combined. Yet it has eked out growth of less than 2%.

To millions of Americans this is just unreal — and Mr. Trump, in the most important and even radical feature of his demarche, lays the blame at the clay feet of the Federal Reserve. The GOP nominee, speaking to newspapermen on his campaign plane, accused the Fed, as Reuters paraphrased him, “of keeping interest rates low to help President Barack Obama.” He’d been asked about interest rates. Said The Donald: “They’re keeping the rates down so that everything else doesn’t go down. We have a very false economy,” he said.

We don’t think we’ve heard a presidential candidate talk about the economy in quite this way — at least not since Congressman Ron Paul, whom James Grant likes to call the “party of one,” sought the GOP nomination. Not that Mr. Trump’s ideas are so heretical. “At some point the rates are going to have to change,” Reuters quoted him as saying. Both the Wall Street Journal and economist David Malpass have been making that point for months (or years). “The only thing that is strong,” Reuters quoted Mr. Trump as saying, “is the artificial stock market.”

This strikes us as a positive development in Mr. Trump’s campaign. It puts him in front on the economy and leaves Mrs. Clinton with few options than to put a falsely rosy tint on an economy that has stranded tens of millions of Americans. She has abandoned, in the Trans Pacific Partnership, the very trade agreement that she once praised as ideal and that is a lynchpin to the pivot to Asia for which the administration forsook victory in the Middle East. And she offers little but tax increases, spending, borrowing, and regulation as a forward strategy.

Mr. Trump, by contrast, can take the next step and address the monetary question. If the Fed has failed — and it is not the only central bank that has had and that has found itself without further monetary ammunition — can monetary reform be far behind? The most significant monetary move in the past month, in our view, was the endorsement by the Wall Street Journal of a proper monetary commission, which is now before the Senate. That would put the GOP candidate on the same page with the Speaker, Paul Ryan, and Congressman Kevin Brady.

Chairman Brady has been plumping for a centennial monetary commission for several years now, starting when he was chairman of the Joint Economic Committee and continuing into his chairmanship of Ways and Means. What an alignment of leadership he and Messrs. Ryan and Trump and a Vice President Pence could provide. The commission would open up the whole question of monetary policy, including whether to return America to a system of a dollar defined in gold. In using the phrase “false economy” Mr. Trump has signaled that he comprehends that we need to reconnect the economy to some measure of value that is real.

Great Britain will build a wall in Calais, France, in order to help prevent illegal immigration. The recent surge of migrants coming into Europe from the middle east has been cited as one of the primary factors in the UK’s recent vote to exit the European Union. The British plan is to build a 13 foot wall around the port of Calais, which is the busiest port between the two countries. The Brits say that the wall is needed to better prevent illegal immigrants from jumping on board ships or intercepting vehicles in order to gain entry into the UK where they can then lodge applications as asylum seekers.

Donald Trump and his pledge to build a wall along the American southern border with Mexico has been much maligned by Hillary Clinton who once supported a wall herself, Democrats and some Republicans as a ridiculous and impractical plan. Yet Trump and company have repeatedly highlighted the effectiveness of walls — such as the wall separating Israel from the Palestinian West Bank, which has been credited with helping to limit terrorist attacks. As Trump said to a crowd in New Hampshire last year, “You ask Israel whether or not a wall works.” Well, it appears that the British government certainly thinks that it does.

The F35 will be obsolete before it is fully operational. Its only strong feature is its stealth capacity. It is slow and unmaneuverable otherwise. There have been reports of Russia defeating stealth too

A Chinese firm has claimed that they have developed radar technology that can detect stealth jets. The quantum radar was reportedly created by Intelligent Perception Technology, a branch of defence and electronics firm CETC.

They claim it is capable of detecting a target at a range of 60 miles and according to the Xinhua news agency, it was successfully tested last month.

It is believed the radar uses quantum entanglement photons, which means it has better detection capabilities than conventional systems. This means it can more easily track modern aircraft that use stealth technology or baffle enemy radar.

The new technology also comes after China launched the world's first quantum communications satellite, which uses quantum entanglement to solve codes.

The Navy is in a world of hurt. It’s less than half the size it was when Ronald Reagan left office. Carrier air wings have fewer combat aircraft than they did in 1991 — about 33% less. We’ve gone from 15 carriers to 10. Now, the Navy’s newest carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN 78), may not be able to deploy on time, leaving America short one more carrier.

That’s not a good thing. The ChiComs have played a Cersei Lannister gambit in the South China Sea — and that puts American allies like the Philippines in a bind. America also has to confront the presence of China’s DF-21 anti-ship ballistic missile — which, while overhyped, still inflicts virtual attrition on a Navy with too few hulls.

How did we get here? First, the Navy chose to prematurely retire the USS Enterprise (CVN 65), banking on the Ford being ready to fill in. Even though Newport News Shipbuilding could have done a second overhaul on the Big E, the Obama administration ignored the growing threats from China, Iran (which has been harassing American ships), and the Islamic State (not to mention the fact that the Russian reset wasn’t quite working), and went ahead with the scrapping process. Second, the Obama administration began to scrap seven older carriers that were being kept in reserve.

Did we mention the world was getting more dangerous while we junk eight major strategic assets?

It took almost seven years from laying the Gerald R. Ford’s keel to getting her to this point, and even then, with all of the new technology on board — like the electromagnetic catapults, the AN/SPY-3 radar, and new arresting gear — it may take time even after she’s commissioned for her to be ready to deploy.

You’d think that Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus would have acted to address this before it got too severe. But Mabus has been more interested in dissing Navy heroes who don’t buy into the politically correct changes in DOD policy he and others have been pushing.

Sadly, the Navy’s carrier force isn’t the only place there the mismanagement of our forces has been a continuing trend. Three of the Navy’s Freedom-class littoral combat ships have suffered damage to their engines. The Marine Corps has been struggling to find sufficient numbers of flyable F/A-18 Hornets. The Air Force is falling short of pilots. Army OH-58s are getting older as proposed replacements like the RAH-66 and ARH-70 fall victim to the budget axe. Even ground troops could see defense cuts rob them of the game-changing XM25 “Punisher,” officially known as the Counter Defilade Target Engagement (CDTE) System, even though it performed well in operational testing in Afghanistan.

Cuts like these, not to mention the onslaught of political correctness and social engineering, don’t just hurt the material performance of our troops. As Mark Alexander wrote Wednesday, they also kill the military’s most valuable resource — morale. That means troops, some with combat experience, may retire or not re-enlist, creating a vicious cycle of declining readiness due to subpar training due to loss of experience.

Reversing this trend won’t be easy, but it will be essential. Because an unprepared military invites aggression — which will be far more expensive in money, equipment and lives than it would have been to properly maintain our forces in the first place.

The U.S.-Mexico border gets a lot of attention. Yet here’s what many people don’t realize: It’s probably the shortest of the borders the United States has. The U.S.-Canadian border is longer, at 5,525 miles to 1,960. And America’s largest border is its 12,380-mile coastline — 65% longer than the combined land borders the U.S. shares with its northern and southern neighbors. Yet Customs and Border Protection, which handles the land border, has about 50% more personnel than the U.S. Coast Guard. Does something seem wrong with this picture?

It should. The Coast Guard, the smallest of America’s Armed Forces — and the only one not under the Department of Defense — has multiple missions: It is the primary maritime search-and-rescue agency; it’s responsible for interdicting drugs and migrants; and provides port security, law enforcement, national security missions, environmental protection, maritime safety, maintenance of navigation aids, and tracking of icebergs. It doesn’t just have a full plate — it has a full buffet table. In 2014, the commander of United States Southern Command, General John Kelly, admitted that 75% of drug smugglers were getting through.

Yet the Coast Guard could very well end up with fewer hulls available to put into the water — and that makes it unlikely that the percentage of smugglers getting through will go down. Plans call for eight Bertholf-class “national security” cutters to replace 12 Hamilton-class high-endurance cutters. That process is well underway, and the Hamiltons are being handed over to allies like the Philippines, giving them a needed boost (although far from what may be necessary to deal with an aggressive China). But eight hulls cannot cover 12 locations, no matter how good each individual vessel is. Quantity matters.

The same issue is emerging with the Coast Guard’s plans to replace 14 active Reliance-class and 13 Bear-class medium endurance cutters. The Offshore Patrol Cutter program plans to purchase 25 cutters to replace 27 for $484 million each. That’s pretty expensive, and here’s the kicker — there may be a better option already in service with most of the R&D already done.

The Freedom-class littoral combat ship has had its problems, to put it mildly. However, in 2010, USS Freedom racked up four drug busts in a SOUTHCOM deployment that lasted 47 days, and it made those four busts while also carrying out three “theater security cooperation” port visits. Furthermore, each of those vessels costs only $362 million — and with no R&D, the Coast Guard could afford 33 vessels for the $12.1 billion that the Offshore Patrol Cutter is slated to cost. That would give the Coast Guard 41 major cutters, as opposed to the 33 that they would have if current plans went into effect. And a bulk buy like this could further reduce the price.

But the Coast Guard has other problems, including a grand total of just 210 aircraft and helicopters. That total should be much higher, and in 2014, the Coast Guard retired its fastest aircraft, the HU-25 Guardian — hampering its ability to respond quickly to drug smuggling or other emergencies. The Coast Guard could also get some of its own eyes in the sky by getting in on the Navy’s purchase of the E-2D Hawkeye radar plane. Buying a dozen of those planes would cost about $2.15 billion — a little over 25% more than the ransom we recently paid to Iran for four hostages. It would do far more to make Americans safe.

Securing America’s maritime borders will be a need in the future — particularly if the U.S.-Mexico border is ever secured. Drug cartels will be looking for a new route to deliver their product, and if the Coast Guard is stretched too thin, the sea may very well become their avenue of choice.

Background

Postings from Brisbane, Australia by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.) -- former member of the Australia-Soviet Friendship Society, former anarcho-capitalist and former member of the British Conservative party. And now a "Deplorable"

When it comes to political incorrectness, I hit the trifecta. I talk about race, IQ and social class. I have an academic background in all three subjects but that wins me no forgiveness

At its most basic psychological level, conservatives are the contented people and Leftists are the discontented people. And both are largely dispositional, inborn -- which is why they so rarely change

As a good academic, I first define my terms: A Leftist is a person who is so dissatisfied with the way things naturally are that he/she is prepared to use force to make people behave in ways that they otherwise would not.

So an essential feature of Leftism is that they think they have the right to tell other people what to do

Leftists are the disgruntled folk. They see things in the world that are not ideal and conclude therefore that they have the right to change those things by force. Conservative explanations of why things are not ideal -- and never can be -- fall on deaf ears

Leftists aim to deliver dismay and disruption into other people's lives -- and they are good at achieving that.

Leftists are wolfs in sheep's clothing

Liberals are people who don't believe in liberty

German has a word that describes most Leftists well:
"Scheinheilig" - A person who appears to be very kind, soft natured, and filled with pure goodness but behind the facade, has a vile nature. He is seemingly holy but is an unscrupulous person on the inside.

The new faith is very oppressive: Leftist orthodoxy is the new dominant religion of the Western world and it is every bit as bigoted and oppressive as Christianity was at its worst

There are two varieties of authoritarian Leftism. Fascists are soft Leftists, preaching one big happy family -- "Better together" in other words. Communists are hard Leftists, preaching class war.

Equality: The nonsensical and incoherent claim that underlies so much Leftist discourse is "all men are equal". And that is the envier's gospel. It makes not a scrap of sense and shows no contact with reality but it is something that enviers resort to as a way of soothing their envious feelings. They deny the very differences that give them so much heartburn. "Denial" was long ago identified by Freud as a maladaptive psychological defence mechanism and "All men are equal" is a prize example of that. Whatever one thinks of his theories, Freud was undoubtedly an acute observer of people and very few psychologists today would doubt the maladaptive nature of denial as described by Freud.

Socialism is the most evil malady ever to afflict the human brain. The death toll in WWII alone tells you that

You do still occasionally see some mention of the old idea that Leftist parties represent the worker. In the case of the U.S. Democrats that is long gone. Now they want to REFORM the worker. No wonder most working class Americans these days vote Republican. Democrats are the party of the minorities and the smug

We live in a country where the people own the Government and not in a country where the Government owns the people -- Churchill

The Left have a lot in common with tortoises. They have a thick mental shell that protects them from the reality of the world about them

Definition of a Socialist: Someone who wants everything you have...except your job.

Let's start with some thought-provoking graphics

Israel: A great powerhouse of the human spirit

The difference in practice

The United Nations: A great ideal but a sordid reality

Alfred Dreyfus, a reminder of French antisemitism still relevant today

The "steamroller" above who got steamrollered by his own hubris. Spitzer is a warning of how self-destructive a vast ego can be -- and also of how destructive of others it can be.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. Allende had just burnt the electoral rolls so it wasn't hard to see what was coming. Pinochet pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Leftist writers usually seem quite reasonable and persuasive at first glance. The problem is not what they say but what they don't say. Leftist beliefs are so counterfactual ("all men are equal", "all men are brothers" etc.) that to be a Leftist you have to have a talent for blotting out from your mind facts that don't suit you. And that is what you see in Leftist writing: A very selective view of reality. Facts that disrupt a Leftist story are simply ignored. Leftist writing is cherrypicking on a grand scale

So if ever you read something written by a Leftist that sounds totally reasonable, you have an urgent need to find out what other people say on that topic. The Leftist will almost certainly have told only half the story

We conservatives have the facts on our side, which is why Leftists never want to debate us and do their best to shut us up. It's very revealing the way they go to great lengths to suppress conservative speech at universities. Universities should be where the best and brightest Leftists are to be found but even they cannot stand the intellectual challenge that conservatism poses for them. It is clearly a great threat to them. If what we say were ridiculous or wrong, they would grab every opportunity to let us know it

A conservative does not hanker after the new; He hankers after the good. Leftists hanker after the untested

Just one thing is sufficient to tell all and sundry what an unamerican lamebrain Obama is. He pronounced an army corps as an army "corpse" Link here. Can you imagine any previous American president doing that? Many were men with significant personal experience in the armed forces in their youth.

A favorite Leftist saying sums up the whole of Leftism: "To make an omelette, you've got to break eggs". They want to change some state of affairs and don't care who or what they destroy or damage in the process. They think their alleged good intentions are sufficient to absolve them from all blame for even the most evil deeds

In practical politics, the art of Leftism is to sound good while proposing something destructive

Leftists are the "we know best" people, meaning that they are intrinsically arrogant. Matthew chapter 6 would not be for them. And arrogance leads directly into authoritarianism

Leftism is fundamentally authoritarian. Whether by revolution or by legislation, Leftists aim to change what people can and must do. When in 2008 Obama said that he wanted to "fundamentally transform" America, he was not talking about America's geography or topography but rather about American people. He wanted them to stop doing things that they wanted to do and make them do things that they did not want to do. Can you get a better definition of authoritarianism than that?

And note that an American President is elected to administer the law, not make it. That seems to have escaped Mr Obama

That Leftism is intrinsically authoritarian is not a new insight. It was well understood by none other than Friedrich Engels (Yes. THAT Engels). His clever short essay On authority was written as a reproof to the dreamy Anarchist Left of his day. It concludes: "A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means"

Inside Every Liberal is a Totalitarian Screaming to Get Out

Insight: "A man's admiration for absolute government is proportionate to the contempt he feels for those around him." —Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859)

Leftists think of themselves as the new nobility

Many people in literary and academic circles today who once supported Stalin and his heirs are generally held blameless and may even still be admired whereas anybody who gave the slightest hint of support for the similarly brutal Hitler regime is an utter polecat and pariah. Why? Because Hitler's enemies were "only" the Jews whereas Stalin's enemies were those the modern day Left still hates -- people who are doing well for themselves materially. Modern day Leftists understand and excuse Stalin and his supporters because Stalin's hates are their hates.

Hatred has long been a central pillar of leftist ideologies, premised as they are on trampling individual rights for the sake of a collectivist plan. Karl Marx boasted that he was “the greatest hater of the so-called positive.” In 1923, V.I. Lenin chillingly declared to the Soviet Commissars of Education, “We must teach our children to hate. Hatred is the basis of communism.” In his tract “Left-Wing Communism,” Lenin went so far as to assert that hatred was “the basis of every socialist and Communist movement.”

If you understand that Leftism is hate, everything falls into place.

The strongest way of influencing people is to convince them that you will do them some good. Leftists and con-men misuse that

Leftists believe only what they want to believe. So presenting evidence contradicting their beliefs simply enrages them. They do not learn from it

Psychological defence mechanisms such as projection play a large part in Leftist thinking and discourse. So their frantic search for evil in the words and deeds of others is easily understandable. The evil is in themselves.

Leftists who think that they can conjure up paradise out of their own limited brains are simply fools -- arrogant and dangerous fools. They essentially know nothing. Conservatives learn from the thousands of years of human brains that have preceded us -- including the Bible, the ancient Greeks and much else. The death of Socrates is, for instance, an amazing prefiguration of the intolerant 21st century. Ask any conservative stranded in academe about his freedom of speech

Thomas Sowell: “There are no solutions, only trade-offs.” Leftists don't understand that -- which is a major factor behind their simplistic thinking. They just never see the trade-offs. But implementing any Leftist idea will hit us all with the trade-offs

"The best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley"[go oft astray] is a well known line from a famous poem by the great Scottish poet, Robert Burns. But the next line is even wiser: "And leave us nought but grief and pain for promised joy". Burns was a Leftist of sorts so he knew how often their theories fail badly.

Mostly, luck happens when opportunity meets preparation.

Most Leftist claims are simply propaganda. Those who utter such claims must know that they are not telling the whole story. Hitler described his Marxist adversaries as "lying with a virtuosity that would bend iron beams". At the risk of ad hominem shrieks, I think that image is too good to remain disused.

Conservatives adapt to the world they live in. Leftists want to change the world to suit themselves

Given their dislike of the world they live in, it would be a surprise if Leftists were patriotic and loved their own people. Prominent English Leftist politician Jack Straw probably said it best: "The English as a race are not worth saving"

In his 1888 book, The Anti-Christ Friedrich Nietzsche argues that we should treat the common man well and kindly because he is the backdrop against which the exceptional man can be seen. So Nietzsche deplores those who agitate the common man: "Whom do I hate most among the rabble of today? The socialist rabble, the chandala [outcast] apostles, who undermine the instinct, the pleasure, the worker's sense of satisfaction with his small existence—who make him envious, who teach him revenge. The source of wrong is never unequal rights but the claim of “equal” rights"

Why do conservatives respect tradition and rely on the past in many ways? Because they want to know what works and the past is the chief source of evidence on that. Leftists are more faith-based. They cling to their theories (e.g. global warming) with religious fervour, even though theories are often wrong

Thinking that you "know best" is an intrinsically precarious and foolish stance -- because nobody does. Reality is so complex and unpredictable that it can rarely be predicted far ahead. Conservatives can see that and that is why conservatives always want change to be done gradually, in a step by step way. So the Leftist often finds the things he "knows" to be out of step with reality, which challenges him and his ego. Sadly, rather than abandoning the things he "knows", he usually resorts to psychological defence mechanisms such as denial and projection. He is largely impervious to argument because he has to be. He can't afford to let reality in.

A prize example of the Leftist tendency to projection (seeing your own faults in others) is the absurd Robert "Bob" Altemeyer, an acclaimed psychologist and father of a Canadian Leftist politician. Altemeyer claims that there is no such thing as Leftist authoritarianism and that it is conservatives who are "Enemies of Freedom". That Leftists (e.g. Mrs Obama) are such enemies of freedom that they even want to dictate what people eat has apparently passed Altemeyer by. Even Stalin did not go that far. And there is the little fact that all the great authoritarian regimes of the 20th century (Stalin, Hitler and Mao) were socialist. Freud saw reliance on defence mechanisms such as projection as being maladjusted. It is difficult to dispute that. Altemeyer is too illiterate to realize it but he is actually a good Hegelian. Hegel thought that "true" freedom was marching in step with a Left-led herd.

What libertarian said this? “The bureaucracy is a parasite on the body of society, a parasite which ‘chokes’ all its vital pores…The state is a parasitic organism”. It was VI Lenin, in August 1917, before he set up his own vastly bureaucratic state. He could see the problem but had no clue about how to solve it.

Leftist stupidity is a special class of stupidity. The people concerned are mostly not stupid in general but they have a character defect (mostly arrogance) that makes them impatient with complexity and unwilling to study it. So in their policies they repeatedly shoot themselves in the foot; They fail to attain their objectives. The world IS complex so a simplistic approach to it CANNOT work.

Seminal Leftist philosopher, G.W.F. Hegel said something that certainly applies to his fellow Leftists: "We learn from history that we do not learn from history". And he captured the Left in this saying too: "Evil resides in the very gaze which perceives Evil all around itself".

"A man who is not a socialist at age 20 has no heart; A man who is still a socialist at age 30 has no head". Who said that? Most people attribute it to Winston but as far as I can tell it was first said by Georges Clemenceau, French Premier in WWI -- whose own career approximated the transition concerned. And he in turn was probably updating an earlier saying about monarchy versus Republicanism by Guizot. Other attributions here. There is in fact a normal drift from Left to Right as people get older. Both Reagan and Churchill started out as liberals

Funny how to the Leftist intelligentsia poor blacks are 'oppressed' and poor whites are 'trash'. Racism, anyone?

MESSAGE to Leftists: Even if you killed all conservatives tomorrow, you would just end up in another Soviet Union. Conservatives are all that stand between you and that dismal fate. And you may not even survive at all. Stalin killed off all the old Bolsheviks.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

Just the name of Hitler's political party should be sufficient to reject the claim that Hitler was "Right wing" but Leftists sometimes retort that the name "Democratic People's Republic of Korea" is not informative, in that it is the name of a dismal Stalinist tyranny. But "People's Republic" is a normal name for a Communist country whereas I know of no conservative political party that calls itself a "Socialist Worker's Party". Such parties are in fact usually of the extreme Left (Trotskyite etc.)

Most people find the viciousness of the Nazis to be incomprehensible -- for instance what they did in their concentration camps. But you just have to read a little of the vileness that pours out from modern-day "liberals" in their Twitter and blog comments to understand it all very well. Leftists haven't changed. They are still boiling with hate

Hatred as a motivating force for political strategy leads to misguided ­decisions. “Hatred is blind,” as Alexandre Dumas warned, “rage carries you away; and he who pours out vengeance runs the risk of tasting a bitter draught.”

Who said this in 1968? "I am not, and never have been, a man of the right. My position was on the Left and is now in the centre of politics". It was Sir Oswald Mosley, founder and leader of the British Union of Fascists

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Jesse Owens, the African-American hero of the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, said "Hitler didn't snub me – it was our president who snubbed me. The president didn't even send me a telegram." Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt never even invited the quadruple gold medal-winner to the White House

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

It would be very easy for me to say that I am too much of an individual for the army but I did in fact join the army and enjoy it greatly, as most men do. In my observation, ALL army men are individuals. It is just that they accept discipline in order to be militarily efficient -- which is the whole point of the exercise. But that's too complex for simplistic Leftist thinking, of course

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter: The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

At the beginning of the North/South War, Confederate general Robert E. Lee did not own any slaves. Union General Ulysses L. Grant did.

Was slavery already washed up by the tides of history before Lincoln took it on? Eric Williams in his book "Capitalism and Slavery" tells us: “The commercial capitalism of the eighteenth century developed the wealth of Europe by means of slavery and monopoly. But in so doing it helped to create the industrial capitalism of the nineteenth century, which turned round and destroyed the power of commercial capitalism, slavery, and all its works. Without a grasp of these economic changes the history of the period is meaningless.”

The dark side of American exceptionalism: America could well be seen as the land of folly. It fought two unnecessary civil wars, would have done well to keep out of two world wars, endured the extraordinary folly of Prohibition and twice elected a traitor President -- Barack Obama. That America remains a good place to be is a tribute to the energy and hard work of individual Americans.

“From the fact that people are very different it follows that, if we treat them equally, the result must be inequality in their actual position, and that the only way to place them in an equal position would be to treat them differently. Equality before the law and material equality are therefore not only different but are in conflict with each other; and we can achieve either one or the other, but not both at the same time.” ― Friedrich Hayek, The Constitution Of Liberty

IN BRIEF:

The 10 "cannots" (By William J. H. Boetcker) that Leftist politicians ignore:
*You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.
* You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.
* You cannot help little men by tearing down big men.
* You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer.
* You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.
* You cannot establish sound security on borrowed money.
* You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred.
* You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than you earn.
* You cannot build character and courage by destroying men's initiative and independence.
* And you cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they can and should do for themselves.

A good short definition of conservative: "One who wants you to keep your hand out of his pocket."

Beware of good intentions. They mostly lead to coercion

A gargantuan case of hubris, coupled with stunning level of ignorance about how the real world works, is the essence of progressivism.

The U.S. Constitution is neither "living" nor dead. It is fixed until it is amended. But amending it is the privilege of the people, not of politicians or judges

It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong - Thomas Sowell

Leftists think that utopia can be coerced into existence -- so no dishonesty or brutality is beyond them in pursuit of that "noble" goal

"England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution" -- George Orwell

Was 16th century science pioneer Paracelsus a libertarian? His motto was "Alterius non sit qui suus esse potest" which means "Let no man belong to another who can belong to himself."

"When using today's model of society as a rule, most of history will be found to be full of oppression, bias, and bigotry." What today's arrogant judges of history fail to realize is that they, too, will be judged. What will Americans of 100 years from now make of, say, speech codes, political correctness, and zero tolerance - to name only three? Assuming, of course, there will still be an America that we, today, would recognize. Given the rogue Federal government spy apparatus, I am not at all sure of that. -- Paul Havemann

Economist Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973): "The champions of socialism call themselves progressives, but they recommend a system which is characterized by rigid observance of routine and by a resistance to every kind of improvement. They call themselves liberals, but they are intent upon abolishing liberty. They call themselves democrats, but they yearn for dictatorship. They call themselves revolutionaries, but they want to make the government omnipotent. They promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office."

It's the shared hatred of the rest of us that unites Islamists and the Left.

American liberals don't love America. They despise it. All they love is their own fantasy of what America could become. They are false patriots.

The Democratic Party: Con-men elected by the ignorant and the arrogant

The Democratic Party is a strange amalgam of elites, would-be elites and minorities. No wonder their policies are so confused and irrational

Why are conservatives more at ease with religion? Because it is basic to conservatism that some things are unknowable, and religious people have to accept that too. Leftists think that they know it all and feel threatened by any exceptions to that. Thinking that you know it all is however the pride that comes before a fall.

The characteristic emotion of the Leftist is not envy. It's rage

Leftists are committed to grievance, not truth

The British Left poured out a torrent of hate for Margaret Thatcher on the occasion of her death. She rescued Britain from chaos and restored Britain's prosperity. What's not to hate about that?

The world's dumbest investor? Without doubt it is Uncle Sam. Nobody anywhere could rival the scale of the losses on "investments" made under the Obama administration

"Behind the honeyed but patently absurd pleas for equality is a ruthless drive for placing themselves (the elites) at the top of a new hierarchy of power" -- Murray Rothbard - Egalitarianism and the Elites (1995)

A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to his fellow man, which debt he proposes to pay off with your money. -- G. Gordon Liddy

"World socialism as a whole, and all the figures associated with it, are shrouded in legend; its contradictions are forgotten or concealed; it does not respond to arguments but continually ignores them--all this stems from the mist of irrationality that surrounds socialism and from its instinctive aversion to scientific analysis... The doctrines of socialism seethe with contradictions, its theories are at constant odds with its practice, yet due to a powerful instinct these contradictions do not in the least hinder the unending propaganda of socialism. Indeed, no precise, distinct socialism even exists; instead there is only a vague, rosy notion of something noble and good, of equality, communal ownership, and justice: the advent of these things will bring instant euphoria and a social order beyond reproach." -- Solzhenitsyn

"The heart of the wise inclines to the right, but the heart of the fool to the left." -- Ecclesiastes 10:2 (NIV)

My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government. -- Thomas Jefferson

"Much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of power" -- Bertrand Russell

Evan Sayet: The Left sides "...invariably with evil over good, wrong over right, and the behaviors that lead to failure over those that lead to success." (t=5:35+ on video)

The Republicans are the gracious side of American politics. It is the Democrats who are the nasty party, the haters

Wanting to stay out of the quarrels of other nations is conservative -- but conservatives will fight if attacked or seriously endangered. Anglo/Irish statesman Lord Castlereagh (1769-1822), who led the political coalition that defeated Napoleon, was an isolationist, as were traditional American conservatives.

Some wisdom from the past: "The bosom of America is open to receive not only the opulent and respectable stranger, but the oppressed and persecuted of all nations and religions; whom we shall welcome to a participation of all our rights and privileges, if by decency and propriety of conduct they appear to merit the enjoyment." —George Washington, 1783

Some useful definitions:

If a conservative doesn't like guns, he doesn't buy one. If a liberal doesn't like guns, he wants all guns outlawed. If a conservative is a vegetarian, he doesn't eat meat. If a liberal is a vegetarian, he wants all meat products banned for everyone. If a conservative is down-and-out, he thinks about how to better his situation. A liberal wonders who is going to take care of him. If a conservative doesn't like a talk show host, he switches channels. Liberals demand that those they don't like be shut down. If a conservative is a non-believer, he doesn't go to church. A liberal non-believer wants any mention of God and religion silenced. (Unless it's a foreign religion, of course!) If a conservative decides he needs health care, he goes about shopping for it, or may choose a job that provides it. A liberal demands that the rest of us pay for his.

There is better evidence for creation than there is for the Leftist claim that “gender” is a “social construct”. Most Leftist claims seem to be faith-based rather than founded on the facts

Death taxes: You would expect a conscientious person, of whatever degree of intelligence, to reflect on the strange contradiction involved in denying people the right to unearned wealth, while supporting programs that give people unearned wealth.

America is no longer the land of the free. It is now the land of the regulated -- though it is not alone in that, of course

Envy is a strong and widespread human emotion so there has alway been widespread support for policies of economic "levelling". Both the USA and the modern-day State of Israel were founded by communists but reality taught both societies that respect for the individual gave much better outcomes than levelling ideas. Sadly, there are many people in both societies in whom hatred for others is so strong that they are incapable of respect for the individual. The destructiveness of what they support causes them to call themselves many names in different times and places but they are the backbone of the political Left

Gore Vidal: "Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little". Vidal was of course a Leftist

The large number of rich Leftists suggests that, for them, envy is secondary. They are directly driven by hatred and scorn for many of the other people that they see about them. Hatred of others can be rooted in many things, not only in envy. But the haters come together as the Left. Some evidence here showing that envy is not what defines the Left

Leftists hate the world around them and want to change it: the people in it most particularly. Conservatives just want to be left alone to make their own decisions and follow their own values.

The failure of the Soviet experiment has definitely made the American Left more vicious and hate-filled than they were. The plain failure of what passed for ideas among them has enraged rather than humbled them.

Ronald Reagan famously observed that the status quo is Latin for “the mess we’re in.” So much for the vacant Leftist claim that conservatives are simply defenders of the status quo. They think that conservatives are as lacking in principles as they are.

Was Confucius a conservative? The following saying would seem to reflect good conservative caution: "The superior man, when resting in safety, does not forget that danger may come. When in a state of security he does not forget the possibility of ruin. When all is orderly, he does not forget that disorder may come. Thus his person is not endangered, and his States and all their clans are preserved."

The shallow thinkers of the Left sometimes claim that conservatives want to impose their own will on others in the matter of abortion. To make that claim is however to confuse religion with politics. Conservatives are in fact divided about their response to abortion. The REAL opposition to abortion is religious rather than political. And the church which has historically tended to support the LEFT -- the Roman Catholic church -- is the most fervent in the anti-abortion cause. Conservatives are indeed the one side of politics to have moral qualms on the issue but they tend to seek a middle road in dealing with it. Taking the issue to the point of legal prohibitions is a religious doctrine rather than a conservative one -- and the religion concerned may or may not be characteristically conservative. More on that here

The Leftist hunger for change to the society that they hate leads to a hunger for control over other people. And they will do and say anything to get that control: "Power at any price". Leftist politicians are mostly self-aggrandizing crooks who gain power by deceiving the uninformed with snake-oil promises -- power which they invariably use to destroy. Destruction is all that they are good at. Destruction is what haters do.

Leftists are consistent only in their hate. They don't have principles. How can they when "there is no such thing as right and wrong"? All they have is postures, pretend-principles that can be changed as easily as one changes one's shirt

A Leftist assumption: Making money doesn't entitle you to it, but wanting money does.

"Politicians never accuse you of 'greed' for wanting other people's money -- only for wanting to keep your own money." --columnist Joe Sobran (1946-2010)

Leftist policies are candy-coated rat poison that may appear appealing at first, but inevitably do a lot of damage to everyone impacted by them.

A tribute and thanks to Mary Jo Kopechne. Her death was reprehensible but she probably did more by her death that she ever would have in life: She spared the world a President Ted Kennedy. That the heap of corruption that was Ted Kennedy died peacefully in his bed is one of the clearest demonstrations that we do not live in a just world. Even Joe Stalin seems to have been smothered to death by Nikita Khrushchev

I often wonder why Leftists refer to conservatives as "wingnuts". A wingnut is a very useful device that adds versatility wherever it is used. Clearly, Leftists are not even good at abuse. Once they have accused their opponents of racism and Nazism, their cupboard is bare. Similarly, Leftists seem to think it is a devastating critique to refer to "Worldnet Daily" as "Worldnut Daily". The poverty of their argumentation is truly pitiful

The Leftist assertion that there is no such thing as right and wrong has a distinguished history. It was Pontius Pilate who said "What is truth?" (John 18:38). From a Christian viewpoint, the assertion is undoubtedly the Devil's gospel

Even in the Old Testament they knew about "Postmodernism": "Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!" - Isaiah 5:20 (KJV)

Was Solomon the first conservative? "The hearts of men are full of evil and madness is in their hearts" -- Ecclesiastes: 9:3 (RSV). He could almost have been talking about Global Warming.

Leftist hatred of Christianity goes back as far as the massacre of the Carmelite nuns during the French revolution. Yancey has written a whole book tabulating modern Leftist hatred of Christians. It is a rival religion to Leftism.

"If one rejects laissez faire on account of man's fallibility and moral weakness, one must for the same reason also reject every kind of government action." - Ludwig von Mises

Because of their need to be different from the mainstream, Leftists are very good at pretending that sow's ears are silk purses

Among intelligent people, Leftism is a character defect. Leftists HATE success in others -- which is why notably successful societies such as the USA and Israel are hated and failures such as the Palestinians can do no wrong.

A Leftist's beliefs are all designed to pander to his ego. So when you have an argument with a Leftist, you are not really discussing the facts. You are threatening his self esteem. Which is why the normal Leftist response to challenge is mere abuse.

Because of the fragility of a Leftist's ego, anything that threatens it is intolerable and provokes rage. So most Leftist blogs can be summarized in one sentence: "How DARE anybody question what I believe!". Rage and abuse substitute for an appeal to facts and reason.

Because their beliefs serve their ego rather than reality, Leftists just KNOW what is good for us. Conservatives need evidence.

Absolute certainty is the privilege of uneducated men and fanatics. -- C.J. Keyser

Hell is paved with good intentions" -- Boswell's Life of Johnson of 1775

"Almost all professors of the arts and sciences are egregiously conceited, and derive their happiness from their conceit" -- Erasmus

THE FALSIFICATION OF HISTORY HAS DONE MORE TO IMPEDE HUMAN DEVELOPMENT THAN ANY ONE THING KNOWN TO MANKIND -- ROUSSEAU

"Seest thou a man wise in his own conceit? there is more hope of a fool than of him" (Proverbs 26: 12). I think that sums up Leftists pretty well.

Eminent British astrophysicist Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington is often quoted as saying: "Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine." It was probably in fact said by his contemporary, J.B.S. Haldane. But regardless of authorship, it could well be a conservative credo not only about the cosmos but also about human beings and human society. Mankind is too complex to be summed up by simple rules and even complex rules are only approximations with many exceptions.

Politics is the only thing Leftists know about. They know nothing of economics, history or business. Their only expertise is in promoting feelings of grievance

Socialism makes the individual the slave of the state -- capitalism frees them.

Many readers here will have noticed that what I say about Leftists sometimes sounds reminiscent of what Leftists say about conservatives. There is an excellent reason for that. Leftists are great "projectors" (people who see their own faults in others). So a good first step in finding out what is true of Leftists is to look at what they say about conservatives! They even accuse conservatives of projection (of course).

The research shows clearly that one's Left/Right stance is strongly genetically inherited but nobody knows just what specifically is inherited. What is inherited that makes people Leftist or Rightist? There is any amount of evidence that personality traits are strongly genetically inherited so my proposal is that hard-core Leftists are people who tend to let their emotions (including hatred and envy) run away with them and who are much more in need of seeing themselves as better than others -- two attributes that are probably related to one another. Such Leftists may be an evolutionary leftover from a more primitive past.

Leftists seem to believe that if someone like Al Gore says it, it must be right. They obviously have a strong need for an authority figure. The fact that the two most authoritarian regimes of the 20th century (Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia) were socialist is thus no surprise. Leftists often accuse conservatives of being "authoritarian" but that is just part of their usual "projective" strategy -- seeing in others what is really true of themselves.

"With their infernal racial set-asides, racial quotas, and race norming, liberals share many of the Klan's premises. The Klan sees the world in terms of race and ethnicity. So do liberals! Indeed, liberals and white supremacists are the only people left in America who are neurotically obsessed with race. Conservatives champion a color-blind society" -- Ann Coulter

Politicians are in general only a little above average in intelligence so the idea that they can make better decisions for us that we can make ourselves is laughable

A quote from the late Dr. Adrian Rogers: "You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is about the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it."

The Supreme Court of the United States is now and always has been a judicial abomination. Its guiding principles have always been political rather than judicial. It is not as political as Stalin's courts but its respect for the constitution is little better. Some recent abuses: The "equal treatment" provision of the 14th amendment was specifically written to outlaw racial discrimination yet the court has allowed various forms of "affirmative action" for decades -- when all such policies should have been completely stuck down immediately. The 2nd. amendment says that the right to bear arms shall not be infringed yet gun control laws infringe it in every State in the union. The 1st amendment provides that speech shall be freely exercised yet the court has upheld various restrictions on the financing and display of political advertising. The court has found a right to abortion in the constitution when the word abortion is not even mentioned there. The court invents rights that do not exist and denies rights that do.

The basic aim of all bureaucrats is to maximize their funding and minimize their workload

A lesson in Australian: When an Australian calls someone a "big-noter", he is saying that the person is a chronic and rather pathetic seeker of admiration -- as in someone who often pulls out "big notes" (e.g. $100.00 bills) to pay for things, thus endeavouring to create the impression that he is rich. The term describes the mentality rather than the actual behavior with money and it aptly describes many Leftists. When they purport to show "compassion" by advocating things that cost themselves nothing (e.g. advocating more taxes on "the rich" to help "the poor"), an Australian might say that the Leftist is "big-noting himself". There is an example of the usage here. The term conveys contempt. There is a wise description of Australians generally here

Jesse Jackson: "There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery -- then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved." There ARE important racial differences.

Some Jimmy Carter wisdom: "I think it's inevitable that there will be a lower standard of living than what everybody had always anticipated," he told advisers in 1979. "there's going to be a downward turning."

Heritage is what survives death: Very rare and hence very valuable

Big business is not your friend. As Adam Smith said: "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty or justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary

How can I accept the Communist doctrine, which sets up as its bible, above and beyond criticism, an obsolete textbook which I know not only to be scientifically erroneous but without interest or application to the modern world? How can I adopt a creed which, preferring the mud to the fish, exalts the boorish proletariat above the bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia, who with all their faults, are the quality of life and surely carry the seeds of all human achievement? Even if we need a religion, how can we find it in the turbid rubbish of the red bookshop? It is hard for an educated, decent, intelligent son of Western Europe to find his ideals here, unless he has first suffered some strange and horrid process of conversion which has changed all his values. -- John Maynard Keynes

Some wisdom from "Bron" Waugh: "The purpose of politics is to help them [politicians] overcome these feelings of inferiority and compensate for their personal inadequacies in the pursuit of power"

"There are countless horrible things happening all over the country, and horrible people prospering, but we must never allow them to disturb our equanimity or deflect us from our sacred duty to sabotage and annoy them whenever possible"

The urge to pass new laws must be seen as an illness, not much different from the urge to bite old women. Anyone suspected of suffering from it should either be treated with the appropriate pills or, if it is too late for that, elected to Parliament [or Congress, as the case may be] and paid a huge salary with endless holidays, to do nothing whatever"

"It is my settled opinion, after some years as a political correspondent, that no one is attracted to a political career in the first place unless he is socially or emotionally crippled"

Two lines below of a famous hymn that would be incomprehensible to Leftists today ("honor"? "right"? "freedom?" Freedom to agree with them is the only freedom they believe in)

First to fight for right and freedom,
And to keep our honor clean

It is of course the hymn of the USMC -- still today the relentless warriors that they always were. Freedom needs a soldier

If any of the short observations above about Leftism seem wrong, note that they do not stand alone. The evidence for them is set out at great length in my MONOGRAPH on Leftism.

"It breaks my heart to see (I can't interfere or do anything at my age) what is happening in our country today - this terrible strike of the best men in the world, who beat the Kaiser's army and beat Hitler's army, and never gave in. Pointless, endless. We can't afford that kind of thing. And then this growing division which the noble Lord who has just spoken mentioned, of a comparatively prosperous south, and an ailing north and midlands. That can't go on." -- Mac on the British working class: "the best men in the world" (From his Maiden speech in the House of Lords, 13 November 1984)

"As a Conservative, I am naturally in favour of returning into private ownership and private management all those means of production and distribution which are now controlled by state capitalism"

During Macmillan's time as prime minister, average living standards steadily rose while numerous social reforms were carried out

"Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see." -- Arthur Schopenhauer

JEWS AND ISRAEL

The Bible is an Israeli book

There is a view on both Left and Right that Jews are "too" influential. And it is true that they are more influential than their numbers would indicate. But they are exactly as influential as their IQs would indicate

To me, hostility to the Jews is a terrible tragedy. I weep for them at times. And I do literally put my money where my mouth is. I do at times send money to Israeli charities

My (Gentile) opinion of antisemitism: The Jews are the best we've got so killing them is killing us.

It’s a strange paradox when anti-Zionists argue that Jews should suffer and wander without a homeland while urging that Palestinians ought to have security and territory.

"And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed" -- Genesis 12:3

"O pray for the peace of Jerusalem: They shall prosper that love thee" Psalm 122:6.

If I forget you, Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its skill. May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth if I do not remember you, if I do not consider Jerusalem my highest joy -- Psalm 137 (NIV)

Israel, like the Jews throughout history, is hated not for her vices but her virtues. Israel is hated, as the United States is hated, because Israel is successful, because Israel is free, and because Israel is good. As Maxim Gorky put it: “Whatever nonsense the anti-Semites may talk, they dislike the Jew only because he is obviously better, more adroit, and more willing and capable of work than they are.” Whether driven by culture or genes—or like most behavior, an inextricable mix—the fact of Jewish genius is demonstrable." -- George Gilder

To Leftist haters, all the basic rules of liberal society — rejection of hate speech, commitment to academic freedom, rooting out racism, the absolute commitment to human dignity — go out the window when the subject is Israel.

I have always liked the story of Gideon (See Judges chapters 6 to 8) and it is surely no surprise that in the present age Israel is the Gideon of nations: Few in numbers but big in power and impact.

Is the Israel Defence Force the most effective military force per capita since Genghis Khan? They probably are but they are also the most ethically advanced military force that the world has ever seen

If I were not an atheist, I would believe that God had a sense of humour. He gave his chosen people (the Jews) enormous advantages -- high intelligence and high drive -- but to keep it fair he deprived them of something hugely important too: Political sense. So Jews to this day tend very strongly to be Leftist -- even though the chief source of antisemitism for roughly the last 200 years has been the political Left!

And the other side of the coin is that Jews tend to despise conservatives and Christians. Yet American fundamentalist Christians are the bedrock of the vital American support for Israel, the ultimate bolthole for all Jews. So Jewish political irrationality seems to be a rather good example of the saying that "The LORD giveth and the LORD taketh away". There are many other examples of such perversity (or "balance"). The sometimes severe side-effects of most pharmaceutical drugs is an obvious one but there is another ethnic example too, a rather amusing one. Chinese people are in general smart and patient people but their rate of traffic accidents in China is about 10 times higher than what prevails in Western societies. They are brilliant mathematicians and fearless business entrepreneurs but at the same time bad drivers!

Conservatives, on the other hand, could be antisemitic on entirely rational grounds: Namely, the overwhelming Leftism of the Diaspora Jewish population as a whole. Because they judge the individual, however, only a tiny minority of conservative-oriented people make such general judgments. The longer Jews continue on their "stiff-necked" course, however, the more that is in danger of changing. The children of Israel have been a stiff necked people since the days of Moses, however, so they will no doubt continue to vote with their emotions rather than their reason.

I despair of the ADL. Jews have enough problems already and yet in the ADL one has a prominent Jewish organization that does its best to make itself offensive to Christians. Their Leftism is more important to them than the welfare of Jewry -- which is the exact opposite of what they ostensibly stand for! Jewish cleverness seems to vanish when politics are involved. Fortunately, Christians are true to their saviour and have loving hearts. Jewish dissatisfaction with the myopia of the ADL is outlined here. Note that Foxy was too grand to reply to it.

The above is good testimony to the accuracy of the basic conservative insight that almost anything in human life is too complex to be reduced to any simple rule and too complex to be reduced to any rule at all without allowance for important exceptions to the rule concerned

Amid their many virtues, one virtue is often lacking among Jews in general and Israelis in particular: Humility. And that's an antisemitic comment only if Hashem is antisemitic. From Moses on, the Hebrew prophets repeatedy accused the Israelites of being "stiff-necked" and urged them to repent. So it's no wonder that the greatest Jewish prophet of all -- Jesus -- not only urged humility but exemplified it in his life and death

"Why should the German be interested in the liberation of the Jew, if the Jew is not interested in the liberation of the German?... We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time... In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.... Indeed, in North America, the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world has achieved as its unambiguous and normal expression that the preaching of the Gospel itself and the Christian ministry have become articles of trade... Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist". Who said that? Hitler? No. It was Karl Marx. See also here and here and here. For roughly two centuries now, antisemitism has, throughout the Western world, been principally associated with Leftism (including the socialist Hitler) -- as it is to this day. See here.

Karl Marx hated just about everyone. Even his father, the kindly Heinrich Marx, thought Karl was not much of a human being

Leftists call their hatred of Israel "Anti-Zionism" but Zionists are only a small minority in Israel

Some of the Leftist hatred of Israel is motivated by old-fashioned antisemitism (beliefs in Jewish "control" etc.) but most of it is just the regular Leftist hatred of success in others. And because the societies they inhabit do not give them the vast amount of recognition that their large but weak egos need, some of the most virulent haters of Israel and America live in those countries. So the hatred is the product of pathologically high self-esteem.

Their threatened egos sometimes drive Leftists into quite desperate flights from reality. For instance, they often call Israel an "Apartheid state" -- when it is in fact the Arab states that practice Apartheid -- witness the severe restrictions on Christians in Saudi Arabia. There are no such restrictions in Israel.

If the Palestinians put down their weapons, there'd be peace. If the Israelis put down their weapons, there'd be genocide.

ABOUT

Many people hunger and thirst after righteousness. Some find it in the hatreds of the Left. Others find it in the love of Christ. I don't hunger and thirst after righteousness at all. I hunger and thirst after truth. How old-fashioned can you get?

The kneejerk response of the Green/Left to people who challenge them is to say that the challenger is in the pay of "Big Oil", "Big Business", "Big Pharma", "Exxon-Mobil", "The Pioneer Fund" or some other entity that they see, in their childish way, as a boogeyman. So I think it might be useful for me to point out that I have NEVER received one cent from anybody by way of support for what I write. As a retired person, I live entirely on my own investments. I do not work for anybody and I am not beholden to anybody. And I have NO investments in oil companies, mining companies or "Big Pharma"

UPDATE: Despite my (statistical) aversion to mining stocks, I have recently bought a few shares in BHP -- the world's biggest miner, I gather. I run the grave risk of becoming a speaker of famous last words for saying this but I suspect that BHP is now so big as to be largely immune from the risks that plague most mining companies. I also know of no issue affecting BHP where my writings would have any relevance. The Left seem to have a visceral hatred of miners. I have never quite figured out why.

I imagine that few of my readers will understand it, but I am an unabashed monarchist. And, as someone who was born and bred in a monarchy and who still lives there (i.e. Australia), that gives me no conflicts at all. In theory, one's respect for the monarchy does not depend on who wears the crown but the impeccable behaviour of the present Queen does of course help perpetuate that respect. Aside from my huge respect for the Queen, however, my favourite member of the Royal family is the redheaded Prince Harry. The Royal family is of course a military family and Prince Harry is a great example of that. As one of the world's most privileged people, he could well be an idle layabout but instead he loves his life in the army. When his girlfriend Chelsy ditched him because he was so often away, Prince Harry said: "I love Chelsy but the army comes first". A perfect military man! I doubt that many women would understand or approve of his attitude but perhaps my own small army background powers my approval of that attitude.

I imagine that most Americans might find this rather mad -- but I believe that a constitutional Monarchy is the best form of government presently available. Can a libertarian be a Monarchist? I think so -- and prominent British libertarian Sean Gabb seems to think so too! Long live the Queen! (And note that Australia ranks well above the USA on the Index of Economic freedom. Heh!)

The Australian flag with the Union Jack quartered in it

Throughout Europe there is an association between monarchism and conservatism. It is a little sad that American conservatives do not have access to that satisfaction. So even though Australia is much more distant from Europe (geographically) than the USA is, Australia is in some ways more of an outpost of Europe than America is! Mind you: Australia is not very atypical of its region. Australia lies just South of Asia -- and both Japan and Thailand have greatly respected monarchies. And the demise of the Cambodian monarchy was disastrous for Cambodia

Throughout the world today, possession of a U.S. or U.K. passport is greatly valued. I once shared that view. Developments in recent years have however made me profoundly grateful that I am a 5th generation Australian. My Australian passport is a door into a much less oppressive and much less messed-up place than either the USA or Britain

Following the Sotomayor precedent, I would hope that a wise older white man such as myself with the richness of that experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion than someone who hasn’t lived that life.

IQ and ideology: Most academics are Left-leaning. Why? Because very bright people who have balls go into business, while very bright people with no balls go into academe. I did both with considerable success, which makes me a considerable rarity. Although I am a born academic, I have always been good with money too. My share portfolio even survived the GFC in good shape. The academics hate it that bright people with balls make more money than them.

I have no hesitation in saying that the single book which has influenced me most is the New Testament. And my Scripture blog will show that I know whereof I speak. Some might conclude that I must therefore be a very confused sort of atheist but I can assure everyone that I do not feel the least bit confused. The New Testament is a lighthouse that has illumined the thinking of all sorts of men and women and I am deeply grateful that it has shone on me.

I am rather pleased to report that I am a lifelong conservative. Out of intellectual curiosity, I did in my youth join organizations from right across the political spectrum so I am certainly not closed-minded and am very familiar with the full spectrum of political thinking. Nonetheless, I did not have to undergo the lurch from Left to Right that so many people undergo. At age 13 I used my pocket-money to subscribe to the "Reader's Digest" -- the main conservative organ available in small town Australia of the 1950s. I have learnt much since but am pleased and amused to note that history has since confirmed most of what I thought at that early age. Conservatism is in touch with reality. Leftism is not.

I imagine that the RD are still sending mailouts to my 1950s address

Most teenagers have sporting and movie posters on their bedroom walls. At age 14 I had a map of Taiwan on my wall.

"Remind me never to get this guy mad at me" -- Instapundit

It seems to be a common view that you cannot talk informatively about a country unless you have been there. I completely reject that view but it is nonetheless likely that some Leftist dimbulb will at some stage aver that any comments I make about politics and events in the USA should not be heeded because I am an Australian who has lived almost all his life in Australia. I am reluctant to pander to such ignorance in the era of the "global village" but for the sake of the argument I might mention that I have visited the USA 3 times -- spending enough time in Los Angeles and NYC to get to know a fair bit about those places at least. I did however get outside those places enough to realize that they are NOT America.

"Intellectual" = Leftist dreamer. I have more publications in the academic journals than almost all "public intellectuals" but I am never called an intellectual and nor would I want to be. Call me a scholar or an academic, however, and I will accept either as a just and earned appellation

A small personal note: I have always been very self-confident. I inherited it from my mother, along with my skeptical nature. So I don't need to feed my self-esteem by claiming that I am wiser than others -- which is what Leftists do.

As with conservatives generally, it bothers me not a bit to admit to large gaps in my knowledge and understanding. For instance, I don't know if the slight global warming of the 20th century will resume in the 21st, though I suspect not. And I don't know what a "healthy" diet is, if there is one. Constantly-changing official advice on the matter suggests that nobody knows

Leftists are usually just anxious little people trying to pretend that they are significant. No doubt there are some Leftists who are genuinely concerned about inequities in our society but their arrogance lies in thinking that they understand it without close enquiry

My academic background

My full name is Dr. John Joseph RAY. I am a former university teacher aged 65 at the time of writing in 2009. I was born of Australian pioneer stock in 1943 at Innisfail in the State of Queensland in Australia. I trace my ancestry wholly to the British Isles. After an early education at Innisfail State Rural School and Cairns State High School, I taught myself for matriculation. I took my B.A. in Psychology from the University of Queensland in Brisbane. I then moved to Sydney (in New South Wales, Australia) and took my M.A. in psychology from the University of Sydney in 1969 and my Ph.D. from the School of Behavioural Sciences at Macquarie University in 1974. I first tutored in psychology at Macquarie University and then taught sociology at the University of NSW. My doctorate is in psychology but I taught mainly sociology in my 14 years as a university teacher. In High Schools I taught economics. I have taught in both traditional and "progressive" (low discipline) High Schools. Fuller biographical notes here

I completed the work for my Ph.D. at the end of 1970 but the degree was not awarded until 1974 -- due to some academic nastiness from Seymour Martin Lipset and Fred Emery. A conservative or libertarian who makes it through the academic maze has to be at least twice as good as the average conformist Leftist. Fortunately, I am a born academic.

Despite my great sympathy and respect for Christianity, I am the most complete atheist you could find. I don't even believe that the word "God" is meaningful. I am not at all original in that view, of course. Such views are particularly associated with the noted German philosopher Rudolf Carnap. Unlike Carnap, however, none of my wives have committed suicide

Very occasionally in my writings I make reference to the greats of analytical philosophy such as Carnap and Wittgenstein. As philosophy is a heavily Leftist discipline however, I have long awaited an attack from some philosopher accusing me of making coat-trailing references not backed by any real philosophical erudition. I suppose it is encouraging that no such attacks have eventuated but I thought that I should perhaps forestall them anyway -- by pointing out that in my younger days I did complete three full-year courses in analytical philosophy (at 3 different universities!) and that I have had papers on mainstream analytical philosophy topics published in academic journals

As well as being an academic, I am an army man and I am pleased and proud to say that I have worn my country's uniform. Although my service in the Australian army was chiefly noted for its un-notability, I DID join voluntarily in the Vietnam era, I DID reach the rank of Sergeant, and I DID volunteer for a posting in Vietnam. So I think I may be forgiven for saying something that most army men think but which most don't say because they think it is too obvious: The profession of arms is the noblest profession of all because it is the only profession where you offer to lay down your life in performing your duties. Our men fought so that people could say and think what they like but I myself always treat military men with great respect -- respect which in my view is simply their due.

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day and there is JUST ONE saying of Hitler's that I rather like. It may not even be original to him but it is found in chapter 2 of Mein Kampf (published in 1925): "Widerstaende sind nicht da, dass man vor ihnen kapituliert, sondern dass man sie bricht". The equivalent English saying is "Difficulties exist to be overcome" and that traces back at least to the 1920s -- with attributions to Montessori and others. Hitler's metaphor is however one of smashing barriers rather than of politely hopping over them and I am myself certainly more outspoken than polite. Hitler's colloquial Southern German is notoriously difficult to translate but I think I can manage a reasonable translation of that saying: "Resistance is there not for us to capitulate to but for us to break". I am quite sure that I don't have anything like that degree of determination in my own life but it seems to me to be a good attitude in general anyway

I have used many sites to post my writings over the years and many have gone bad on me for various reasons. So if you click on a link here to my other writings you may get a "page not found" response if the link was put up some time before the present. All is not lost, however. All my writings have been reposted elsewhere. If you do strike a failed link, just take the filename (the last part of the link) and add it to the address of any of my current home pages and -- Voila! -- you should find the article concerned.

COMMENTS: I have gradually added comments facilities to all my blogs. The comments I get are interesting. They are mostly from Leftists and most consist either of abuse or mere assertions. Reasoned arguments backed up by references to supporting evidence are almost unheard of from Leftists. Needless to say, I just delete such useless comments.

You can email me here (Hotmail address). In emailing me, you can address me as "John", "Jon", "Dr. Ray" or "JR" and that will be fine -- but my preference is for "JR" -- and that preference has NOTHING to do with an American soap opera that featured a character who was referred to in that way

There are also two blogspot blogs which record what I think are my main recent articles here and here. Similar content can be more conveniently accessed via my subject-indexed list of short articles here or here (I rarely write long articles these days)

NOTE: The archives provided by blogspot below are rather inconvenient. They break each month up into small bits. If you want to scan whole months at a time, the backup archives will suit better. See here or here